Clinton’s education debate is a sham

Clinton’s education debate is a sham

Misinformation, scare tactics overshadow success of current
student loan program

By Lamar Alexander

As his re-election campaign begins, President Clinton has found
an issue to frighten Americans and convince them that Republicans
cannot be trusted to govern: student aid and college loans.

It is a powerful issue. Virtually every one of us hopes our
children will be able to pursue some form of higher education as a
means of getting ahead. Yet today, as the cost of college continues
to climb faster than the rate of inflation, paying for higher
education is a hardship for most families.

My sister, for example, has gone back to work so that she and
her husband can afford a good college education for their eldest
son. She will probably keep working until her youngest son has
graduated from college.

The president is deliberately preying on this anxiety about the
cost and accessibility of college that millions of Americans, in
the same situation as my sister, must deal with. It is a shameless
line of attack.

Three years ago, Bill Clinton ran for president on the promise
that every American student who wanted to pay off his student loans
with public service would be able to do so. It was a preposterous
promise that he surely knew he could not keep. Even when he
controlled both houses of Congress, Democrats were prepared to fund
only a tiny fraction of his fanciful proposal.

But the greater irony is that as the president scolds
Republicans for purportedly assaulting student aid, he is pushing
his own scheme to revamp federal college loans, a scheme that
represents a real threat to the long-term viability of the
program.

First, a few facts. Despite the Chicken Little rhetoric coming
from the White House and from the Democrats in Congress, student
loans are more readily available today than ever before in our
history.

Next year, some 6.1 million students will receive a federal loan
for their post-secondary education – the largest number ever. These
are grants available to nearly all low and middle income families.
In fact, roughly half of the students attending college in this
country now receive some form of federal assistance.

Even the Republican plan to balance the budget won’t diminish
the role of student loans. The Republican plan would increase the
size of student loans next year. Funding for these loans will
increase 50 percent over the next seven years, even as the deficit
is eliminated. The Senate has proposed some small fee increases on
the colleges themselves. (The House proposes no fee increase at
all.) The interest subsidy now given to students while they remain
in school will stay in place.

The only significant change in the program would be requiring
students to pay interest during the first six months after they
complete their studies. The cost to the average college graduate
will be about $9 per month, an amount that will save taxpayers $3.5
billion ove r the next seven years.

So much for the spurious charges that the student loan program
is being "gutted" by a heartless Congress.

The president’s own plan for student aid, on the other hand, is
something that parents and taxpayers should be worried about. Last
year, he began shifting the student loan program away from private
banks and state guarantee agencies and into the Department of
Education itself. Now he proposes letting this inept, sluggish,
bureaucratic federal agency – a place I know well – take over the
entire program.

To be sure, the current student loan program suffers from many
administrative defects, including a default rate that is far too
high.

When I was secretary of education, working with Congress, I took
a number of steps to rein in the problem. Yet, I vigorously opposed
letting the government take over the loan program itself, an idea
that was first talked about back then.

No one has ever persuaded me that the Department of Education –
or any other government agency – in Washington, D.C. can do a
better job of making and collecting loans than the thousands of
banks around the country.

At a time when we are trying to reduce the size of government,
the president’s "direct lending program," as it is known, would
turn the federal government into the third largest consumer lender
in the country. It would massively increase the federal debt; it
would do nothing to improve service or expand access to loans.

In July, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the
direct lending program would also cost tax payers an additional
$1.5 billion – much of that in salaries for additional Department
of Education bureaucrats. Is this what President Clinton means by
"re-inventing government"?

What the president will not admit is that the current student
loan program has largely been a success. Providing students with an
opportunity to pursue higher education at the college of their
choice is part of the reason we have the finest colleges,
universities and technical institutes in the world today.

As secretary of education, I recommended increasing the amount
the federal government spends on student loans because I believed
then, as now, that giving students more opportunities to acquire
advanced skills and knowledge is what out country depends to thrive
in the next century.

But I never viewed this program merely in budget terms. The
reason our student loan program is popular and successful has less
to do with the money we spend on it than with the fact that we
allow American students to get a loan and then take it to any
accredited institution they choose. No one says that you can’t use
the money at Notre Dame, or Yeshiva or Harvard. Students choose the
school they believe will serve them best. It has worked this way
since the GI Bill.

You will never hear President Clinton talk about this most
important aspect of the loan program. He wants to avoid the subject
because he knows that if giving parents and students the ability to
choose schools with government funds works in higher education, it
will surely work in our high schools and grade schools, as
well.

Yet, whenever this topic – school choice – is raised, Bill
Clinton and his allies in the teachers unions go into a defensive
crouch.

So, instead of promoting the choice and accessibility that have
come to define our national college loan program, Bill Clinton is
trying to create a sham debate about funding that is full of
misinformation and scare tactics coupled with needless government
expansion. American parents and students deserve better.

Alexander, a Republican presidential candidate, was U.S.
secretary of education and the former president of the University
of Tennessee.

Daily Bruin File Photo

Lamar Alexander

Comments to [email protected]