Everyday Ethics

A recent proposal by the Obama administration suggested a bold new direction for the way that student loans are administered in the United States.  Citing a potential savings of billions of dollars, Obama suggested that the U.S.  simply eliminate the middleman, the student loan industry itself, and make educational lending an agreement between students and their government.  Opponents of big government were appalled, claiming that this proposal represented yet another step toward the kind of socialist government that terrifies them.  Before analyzing this reaction, we ought to say a bit about why any president would propose such a massive alteration to the business of educational lending.

First, a college education has become absurdly expensive in the last decade.  It is now not uncommon for students to graduate with a bachelor’s degree and $100,000 in student loan debt.  The old adage that student loan debt is “good debt” ceases to apply when you are talking about 100K.  Student loan debt is certainly more manageable than other types of debt, but that does not make it good.

Further, it is becoming increasingly difficult, especially with the current economic situation, for students to get the funds that they need.  Add to this the significant role of education in future life success, plus the fact that the U.S. is now woefully behind even somewhat lackluster European and Asian nations in terms of both quality and quantity of college graduates, and you have a great deal of social pressure to make a college education more accessible.

Obama’s solution is simple.  The U.S. government releases billions of dollars in guaranteed funds to a small number of student lending companies.  These companies control the industry, but they also eat up a substantial chunk of that funding through administrative costs and other expenses.  If the government could eliminate this waste, it would free up more money for lending.  The easiest way to do this is to eliminate the lenders themselves, and make the U.S. government the sole student loan provider.

As I stated above, the reply from critics of this proposal primarily focused on concerns about whether the government ought to have this kind of control over who gets money for college.  The concern, as it always seems to be with anything Obama does, is that this is part of some master plan to convert the U.S. to a European –style socialism, with expansive safety nets and government programs and high taxes to pay for them.

My reply to this off-target concern is twofold.  First, look at the list of international quality-of-life rankings.  The frontrunners are all European-style socialist democracies.  Second, present the argument that socialism is intrinsically bad, or that it will necessarily produce bad consequences.  I have yet to hear this argument, or a reply to the fact that residents in these nations leave qualitatively better lives.

Political shenanigans aside, the concerns about big government, and about the cost of student lending for that matter, miss a crucial point.  There is a burgeoning debate concerning several positive rights that many Americans believe exist, but that are not well protected in our current system.  One of those is a right to education.

As we’ve discussed earlier, a right to an education is a positive right because it confers a benefit on its bearer.  The right to at least some kind of education is already established by the contractual nature of taxes and public education.  We pay taxes, and it’s agreed that government will provide the opportunity for our children to get an education of reasonable quality.  It seems that we’ve already enshrined some semblance of this right into our national creed.

Two questions follow.  First, does this right to an education extend to a college education?  And if it does, are we granting this right adequate protection when we make college prohibitively expensive for some, and encourage others to take on a home mortgage worth of debt to obtain it?  This is where positive rights become exceedingly tricky.  The right to an education requires the conferral of certain benefits, and it’s an open question whether that ought to include a free college education.

I won’t pursue this question in detail here, but two final points are worth making.  First, once we confer a positive right to an education and require that taxes be paid to fund it, which we’ve done, we need an argument for why this wouldn’t include a free (or much less expensive) college education.  In other words, the burden of proof in this case is on those who would deny this right, rather than those who promote it.  In addition, notice how our elected officials have again failed, however unconsciously, to recognize the really interesting and important political questions that an issue raises, in order to focus on partisan bickering and rhetoric.  It seems they’ve missed the point again.  Sadly, I’m not surprised.

About the Author

Elijah Weber is a graduate student at Bowling Green State University. He holds a Master's degree in philosophy from Colorado State University, and Bachelor’s degrees in sociology and philosophy from Chapman Univerity. He currently lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with his wife Laura, his son Brandon, age two and a half, and two cats, both of whom are mentally deranged.