While President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats want to socialize the debt of college loan recipients among the working and middle classes, U.S. Sen. Rick Scott wants one group forgotten in this equation to bear more responsibility:
Colleges.
The Florida Republican recently introduced the Changing Our Learning, Loans, Endowments, and Graduation Expectations, or COLLEGE, Act.
The bill seeks to motivate universities to help students obtain meaningful degrees that can allow them to repay their debts.
“For far too long, state and federal leaders have taken a misguided and failed approach to managing public institutions of higher education,” Scott said in a statement. “The result of their decades of failed policy and mismanagement is millions of Americans with mountains of student debt racked up earning degrees that haven’t prepared them for good, high-paying jobs in the real world.”
“Now, these same ‘leaders’ are claiming that the answer to our higher education problems is massive and unconditional student loan debt forgiveness. It’s choosing to treat a symptom when we can cure the disease.”
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Under Scott’s measure, colleges would increasingly be on the hook for some of the loan balance of students who default on repayment. It begins at 1 percent of outstanding unpaid balances of students who struggle to pay back the loans and eventually maxes out the colleges’ responsibility at 10 percent of defaulted-loan amounts at the end of 10 years.
Scott’s proposal also makes the Education Department publish the 6-year graduation rate for each academic program, the percentage of graduates who are employed full-time or continuing their education full-time after graduation, and the cost to graduate with a degree for each academic program. The purpose of that is to ensure schools are helping students gain an education that makes them self-sufficient.
Finally, the bill would require wealthy colleges to bear some of the cost of educating their students. For instance, any university with an endowment of between $1 billion and $5 billion would dole out a 25 percent cost match for students with federal financial aid. The match would increase with the size of the endowment.
For example, schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford, all of which have endowments topping $25 billion would be required to pay 75 percent of the cost of federal financial aid for eligible students.
“If we want real results that improve student performance, boost post-graduation job placement and keep tuition affordable, we need to do the hard work of actually holding colleges and universities responsible for the outcomes of their students and accountable to the American taxpayer,” said Scott. “My COLLEGE Act takes big, important steps toward doing exactly that.”
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“As governor of Florida, I fought every day to improve higher education in the Sunshine State. Our hard work with the leaders of Florida’s colleges and universities allowed us to increase transparency of higher education expenses, keep higher education affordable by holding the line on tuition and improve both educational and post-graduation outcomes for our students,” he continued.
“This all resulted in U.S. News and World Report naming Florida’s higher education system as the best in the country in 2017 – a position it has held every year since.”
“The COLLEGE Act continues this important work and will apply the lessons we learned in Florida to higher education institutions and systems across the nation. I urge my colleagues to support this good bill and join me in our fight to put America’s students first,” Scott said.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Free Press.
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