What's missing from this article in USA Today about student loan debt?

This article has several sympathy-generating stories about how people will struggle to pay student debt after three years during which they have been allowed to skate.

'A fighting force': How Americans with crushing debt plan to repay their student loans

Why were they allowed to skip payments so long, when Biden and the Democrats brag about how great their economic policies are?  Were the delays used to buy votes?  I think the question answers itself. 

What you don't see in the article is any blame on the colleges and universities that continued to ratchet up their costs much faster than inflation — as they have been doing for half a century.

Nor do you see any blame on politicians that kept giving bigger loans without asking colleges to control their costs.

And the solution proposed now by Democrats is just to have others — including the majority who do not have college degrees — pay off the debt that students incurred, again without telling colleges to make themselves more affordable.  The problem will therefore continue to compound.  Why should people, taxpayers be forced to pay for something where they get no benefit? 

A good solution would be for the colleges to guarantee half of the debt.  After all, they are the ones who benefited from the proceeds of the debt.  They ratcheted up their salaries and benefits as they charged students more money, so they should be forced to eat some of the costs.  Maybe they would think twice before they charged so much for degrees where students couldn't pay it back.  What a concept: responsibility.

When banks, car companies, or credit card companies make loans that people don't pay back, they eat the costs.  They don't run to politicians asking for kickbacks to pay the loans back.  Those companies have a great incentive to make the loans affordable.  Why should colleges be treated differently?

When the price of gas goes up, Democrats frequently accuse Big Oil, and even gas station owners, of gouging, yet you never hear them claim that colleges are gouging.

Maybe it has something to do with the massive donations they receive from employees of higher education and the monochrome left-wing orientation of campus politics almost everywhere.  

Graphic credit: Public domain.

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