The end of academia's Gilded Age

America has a student loan problem, the real issue is that the cost of college tuition has skyrocketed and the value of a diploma has plummeted.

Republican Tom Cotton represents Arkansas in the United States Senate. He is the author of the forthcoming book, "Only the Strong" which will be published by Twelve on November 1, 2022. 

Meanwhile, institutions of higher education are reaping unprecedented profits. College endowments have now ballooned to over $800 billion in value—with Harvard and Yale sitting on over $70 billion of untaxed wealth. Colleges use their massive fortunes not to serve their students but instead to pay for bloated bureaucracies. Between 1976 and 2018, total student enrollment increased by just 78 percent, while the number of college administrators ballooned 616 percent.

The federal government’s guarantee of virtually unlimited student loans is the primary cause of this academic Gilded age. In return for issuing trillions of dollars’ worth of loans and protecting these loans from bankruptcy, the government demands almost nothing in return from the colleges. This enables colleges to pocket extraordinary sums of money, churn out low quality degrees, and never worry about their graduates again, other than to harass them for alumni donations.