Now that she’s the presumptive Democrat nominee, Harris’ political record is getting a closer look and that includes her views on college tuition and student loans. Back in 2018, the then-U.S. senator wrote in an X post that most students understand the “struggle” of student loans.
“Enough. It’s time to make college tuition-free once and for all,” she wrote.
Political science professor Nicholas Giordano, a Campus Reform fellow, tells AFN it is “thoroughly unfair” for those who have never attended college to pay off the student loans of others who did.
“Why should hard-working, tax-paying Americans,” he says, “be the ones to foot the bill for people that got degrees in law, in medicine, and now we're going to have to pay their bills.”
Even more importantly, Giordano says, the promise of a free college education will only create a decline in the quality of secondary education and a decline in the quality of students graduating with a degree.
“And you will see,” he predicts, “that there's not going to be much value in a college degree anymore at a time where employers, parents, and students are already questioning the value of a four-year college degree."
As vice president, Harris and President Joe Biden announced a “three-part plan” in 2022 that promised to magically cancel student loan debt, up to $20,000, through the U.S. Department of Education and its Pell Grant program.
Since nothing is technically free, the cost of wiping away that debate was estimated to cost U.S. taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.
A year later, in a 6-3 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court said the executive action violated a federal law, the HEROES Act. The law allows the Department of Education to “modify” student loan programs but not to “transform them,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority.
According to Gioradano, voters who think they’re being promised something for free by a politician should carefully consider how that turns out.
“Because if [voters] do support a program like this,” he warns, “then the government has a stake in their education, and the government is not going to fund useless college majors."
