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In an unsurprising ruling, the Supreme Court decided to repeal President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, which was aimed at reducing federal education debt. College tuition has been steadily increasing, resulting in student loan debt that has nearly tripled in the past 15 years. As tuition continues to rise, top universities’ endowment funds are growing.
Straight Arrow News contributor Newt Gingrich argues that these substantial endowments should be used for paying off student loans and funding scholarships, rather than being allocated to administrative expenses.
Why should a place like Yale, or Stanford, or Harvard even have a tuition? If you’ve got billions of dollars sitting there in an endowment fund, why aren’t you given free education? And for that matter, if you have the scale of money that Harvard does — and there are a number of other universities in this group who have billions of dollars — why isn’t that part of helping educate the country, rather than sitting there to be used by the faculty and the administrators, who then hire more faculty and more administrators, and particularly administrators?
It’s breathtaking to look at some of these campuses and realize how many people they have now employed there. And you have to say to yourself, why should the average working American have to help subsidize somebody to go to a place like Harvard or Yale, or Stanford or Princeton? Shouldn’t in fact, the endowments of those schools be potentially a place to get the scholarship money for the students, including at the community colleges?
