From the Tom Woods Letter:
As you may have heard, Joe Biden pushed through a partial student loan forgiveness plan today.
This bailout of the wealthy carries the usual perils and moral hazard.
If you doubt that it’s a bailout of the wealthy, here is how student loan debt is presently distributed:
Source: educationdata.org.
And the incentives here are all perverse. People who abstained from taking vacations or buying a new car or getting the latest gadgets or making a down payment so they could instead meet obligations they freely entered into are now made to look like chumps.
For that matter, people who didn’t go to college at all, perhaps because they thought it was a bum deal or because they’d rather learn a skill, are forced to subsidize other people’s choices while getting nothing in return.
Meanwhile, what will the trend in tuition costs be now? When there’s an institution standing by that has shown its willingness to bail out the wealthy, it is very hard to persuade people that it will not ever do so again. On the margin this will make more people (including more people who don’t so much as belong in a college parking lot) make the decision to enter the college industrial complex. Colleges have consistently raised tuition in light of various federal subsidies to students, and there’s no reason to expect that this one will be any different.
So, I have an action item for you.
(And note, incidentally, that it is an action item. We’d be wealthy people if we had a dime for every time someone in our movement simply complained about the problems with and costs of college. We have far fewer people actually doing something about it. Well, here are some people who have done something about it.)
If you or your children would like to avoid college but — and here’s the kicker — prosper anyway, I strongly urge you to check out Praxis, the college-alternative apprenticeship program that has placed countless young people in excellent jobs, building up nest eggs while their peers are all falling into debt.
So yes, your child can succeed without squandering a quarter million on some institution whose faculty can’t stand the sight of you.
I’ve been talking about and promoting Praxis for years, and quite a few young people who listen to the Tom Woods Show have gone through it and prospered with it. If you’d like to check it out, here’s how to watch their full presentation:
http://www.tomwoods.com/praxis
