Student Loan Debt

 I have written virtually this same story before, but in light of the criminal decision by the six corrupt Republican Supreme Court Justices to prevent the Biden administration from doing a thing to help victims of out of control tuition fees at universities across the country, I want to repeat it.


Here is something I found not that long ago when going through some old papers of mine:


This is a term bill I received from when I was a graduate student at Harvard in the early eighties.  If you examine it, you will see that the tuition and health service fees for one semester amounted to $4,119.00.  Based on that number, the total tuition and health service fees for eight semesters of an undergraduate education at Harvard University would be $32,952.00.  For comparison, the annual out of State tuition for a student at UCLA this year is $43,473.00.  The annual tuition at a private university like, say Wellesley, is $60,752.00.  That would make an undergraduate degree at Wellesley over seven times as expensive as one from Harvard only 40 years ago.  Sure, there has been inflation in that time, but this is obscene, particularly as I expect very little of that monstrous increase in costs goes into teaching, with the rest of it going by and large into the same thing that has driven the insane increase in medical care costs, energy costs and virtually everything else in our country- the greed of the rich.  


We cannot afford to see the US become a place where education is solely the province of the rich, particularly given that the same monsters who have driven this inflation have starved public education to the point where it is barely adequate to prepare people for anything but the most menial employment.  Biden's solution is not perfect- the real answer is to break the will of the people who drive this exploitation of ordinary people- but Biden's answer is an answer, and lacking a better one, it was a monstrous crime that the Republican party has once again destroyed an effort to provide basic equity in our country.



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