President Biden’s plan to wipe out up to $20,000 in student loans does not go far enough if you were to ask Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) or Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Sen. Warren has called for erasing up to $50,000, and Sen. Sanders would like to cancel “all student debt in all of America.” Straight Arrow News contributor Adrienne Lawrence argues the student loan forgiveness program will not counter the steep decline in higher education enrollment:
As outrage pours in over President Biden’s paltry student loan forgiveness plan, too many Americans are missing the fact that the pursuit of education is declining in our county. The byproduct of an undereducated society will be disastrous for us in the coming years.
The right needs to stop pushing this anti-education agenda, and everyone needs to step up to make higher education accessible to all. As it concerns higher education, college attendance rates are dropping. More than one million fewer students are enrolled in college now than before the global pandemic began, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
This isn’t just attendance at so-called four-year institutions, mind you. Rather, community college enrollment is down by 13 percent. It’s also not simply a pandemic-related decline. The numbers started to fall in the fall of 2021, when undergraduate schools saw some 500,000 fewer students enroll. Graduate program enrollment, too, slid by nearly 11,000 shortly before the pandemic.
People are not seeking as much higher education as they once did. This is extraordinarily harmful to our society. Not only will we likely start to see a decline in innovation and contributions to mankind, but we’ll also see harm to our economic growth. The fewer educated people in the United States, the worse off we are in terms of our economy. Fewer educated people translates to fewer professionals with the skills, credentials, and degrees necessary to serve our communities. How will we effectively heal our fellow Americans with a shortage of doctors? How will we discover new medicines, treatments, technology with fewer scientists, and so on? Also, fewer educated people translates to fewer professionals earning higher wages. That means less money earned and thus less spent to bolster our economy. The economic ripple effects of lower college enrollment are real.