Letter to the editor, Nov. 18

Responding to Cameron Mount's article on college education that applauds Obama's efforts to relieve student loan debt, I couldn't disagree more.

Unfortunately, the reason why college is so expensive isn't because someone sprinkled pixie dust on education making it exempt from market forces. The reason why education prices are skyrocketing is due solely to the inflation built into the system largely by the federal government.

If you look at historical charts on tuition and fees, you'll be swamped with Google images of 1980-present charts of these rising costs. If you manage to find tuition rates prior to 1980, you will notice the chart is quite flat. Is it a coincidence the federal Department of Education was created in 1979 and this happens to correlate with the same timeframe college costs began to soar?

The problem with the federal government handing out grants and more importantly student loans is the reason why college is so expensive. Subsidizing an entire industry to make sure everyone goes to college makes the costs rise for everyone. Colleges begin to not care about offering the lowest price, highest quality as is the case with everything else in the marketplace because administrators know students will just borrow whatever they can't afford. Obama's newest policy to forgive student loans even sooner than before will make the problem even worse. Now students can lever up, borrow tens of thousands of dollars, and if they just make the absolute minimum payments, time is on their side and the debt will be "gone."

It defies basic economics, not to mention it is entirely immoral. Most claim supply and demand is Economics 101, but most people forget Economics 100's scarcity and opportunity costs. We never look at what we give up when we take wealth from one person and give it to someone else who has no business going in college. What if the money was invested in better technology instead of it wasted on four years of subsidized partying? There's a lot more to it that just handing people education and saying they are better educated. What did we give up so that a business major graduates with $50,000 in debt and is looking into a bleak jobs market?

To disagree with Mount further, college education is in a bubble. Universities have overbuilt, have bloated over-staffed departments and have overcharged for the services they provide. For all the mockery of a few years ago with no-money-down mortgages, the vast majority of people feel student loans are great even though there's no down payment! All this and students now have more than $1 trillion in student loan debt and we're scrambling to find ways for them to borrow more. Yeah, that's a bubble.

Vance Christensen

Senior Finance and Agronomy major