May, 2019
Lincoln -- While driving a few miles northward from Lincoln to visit the farming community of my youth, where I still have deep roots, I heard Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts come on the radio to tell a national audience what Nebraska farmers were thinking about the collapse of Trump's trade talks with China.
The governor said Nebraska farmers were telling him to support the president, even if it hurts them. The sacrifice is worth it, to make China stop stealing intellectual property, according to Nebraska farmers to whom the governor talks. The governor also assured the radio audience (twice) that low crop prices were not the result of the trade war, as prices had been low since 2013. Not to worry about the trade war's effect on prices, so to speak.
To my ears, this was the most incredible statement made by a Nebraska governor about farmers since Norbert Tiemann. When asked if farmers were happy with the Nixon Administration's economic policies, Tiemann said he had "never seen any happy farmers any time." Which may have cost Tiemann the next election.
Nebraska farmers I talk to are not all that informed about intellectual property issues with China, let alone willing to lose their farms because of them. Most farmers had never heard of the issue until they were told it was their patriotic duty to be a pawn in the fight over such matters as copyrights and knock-off products. If they claimed otherwise, let alone said they'd willingly risk their farms over it, they'd be taken for liars or fools, and everybody knew it.
And they don't think low prices should be written off so casually by the governor or anyone else, as if prices were merely something farmers grumble about, rather than something to be urgently addressed.
The farmers I talk to are more knowledgeable about how they are being squeezed, as evidenced in this article from the Lincoln JournalStar:
A...report released Thursday by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City shows that agricultural credit conditions continue to deteriorate in the seven states served by the bank.
In fact, some of the worst conditions were in Nebraska, which had the second-biggest year-over-year drop in farm income, the largest drop in capital spending, the biggest drop in farmland values and the largest percentage of ag producers struggling to produce enough cash flow to service their debt.
But my farmer friends and colleagues also know that the Democratic Party is not sure it cares about what is happening in rural America or not. Some within the party are pleased to see the distress visited by President Trump on the voters who supported him. Some believe Democrats should work only on their urban base and not challenge Republicans on rural issues.
This is not only misguided but a sure way for Democrats to lose the next elections at all levels. Are these Democrats even remotely aware of the pain Republicans are inflicting on rural America?
Rural voters have only so much patience before tipping elections away from those who have hurt them so much for so little. China trade practices could have been handled more easily through WTO, TPP, and our allies. If only that had been the chosen course. Farmers know that.
What farmers of all stripes – conservatives especially – are really thinking is at what point do they call a halt to support for a president who repeatedly damages their economic interests, let alone violates on so many occasions their basic sense of values and decency. That point is soon approaching.
Robert F. Smith's Gift at Morehouse
May, 2019
Washington -- Robert F. Smith's loan cancellation gift to 2019 Morehouse College graduates is getting attention for both good and bad reasons.
If I had his attention I'd shout: "Stop Before You Give Again!"
If someone wants to help with the student debt crisis, there are much better ways to do so. I could give Mr. Smith a list of non-profit charities that for a fraction of his generosity could do multiples more good. If Mr. Smith should happen to see this, I have a list ready. It includes my own charity, which has been remarkably effective with far less money.
Among the more reasoned responses to the Morehouse gift was one from Michelle Singletary, a personal finance columnist who understands paying-for-college issues. She raised the "equity" issue but also puts it into perspective. The gift is inequitable, but don't get too upset about it.
Earlier this month I addressed Elizabeth Warren's debt cancellation plan and found it wanting from the standpoints of both individual and institutional equity. My hope is not to discourage such plans, but to show how they can be improved.
Washington -- Robert F. Smith's loan cancellation gift to 2019 Morehouse College graduates is getting attention for both good and bad reasons.
If I had his attention I'd shout: "Stop Before You Give Again!"
If someone wants to help with the student debt crisis, there are much better ways to do so. I could give Mr. Smith a list of non-profit charities that for a fraction of his generosity could do multiples more good. If Mr. Smith should happen to see this, I have a list ready. It includes my own charity, which has been remarkably effective with far less money.
Among the more reasoned responses to the Morehouse gift was one from Michelle Singletary, a personal finance columnist who understands paying-for-college issues. She raised the "equity" issue but also puts it into perspective. The gift is inequitable, but don't get too upset about it.
Earlier this month I addressed Elizabeth Warren's debt cancellation plan and found it wanting from the standpoints of both individual and institutional equity. My hope is not to discourage such plans, but to show how they can be improved.
Reviewing Two Think-Tank Reports
May, 2019
Washington -- What would we do without Washington think-tanks? Their staffs provide scholarly analyses and recommendations on a wide variety of issues. They are important watchdogs of federal agencies.
Two recent think-tank reports on higher education issues are especially noteworthy, both for their insights and their limitations.
One is New America's report, "Closing the Evidence Gap: Doing More of What Works in Higher Education" by Clare McCann. She takes the Department of Education and the Congress to task for failing to evaluate programs like TRIO and GEAR UP. She identifies the lobby group that has successfully opposed evaluation of TRIO for decades. Too often such studies are loath to take on political realities. That is not the case here.
If anything, however, she could have gone further to give more context to these two programs. They are small potatoes when it comes to overall federal spending on higher education access and success. Pell and the Campus-Based programs, much larger, are not evaluated either, due to resistance not only in the higher education community, but also within the statutorily responsible evaluation office itself, the Department's independent Institute of Education Sciences. Although the situation is now improved with the appointment of Mark Schneider as IES director, when Grover Whitehurst was in the post he proposed an IES legislative authorization that omitted post-secondary programs entirely. Fortunately, the IES statute that Congress eventually authorized contains authority for IES to carry out post-secondary research and evaluation, even though there is currently little meaningful activity under the authority.
As Clare McCann correctly notes, the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) is applicable and places an obligation on the Department of Education to conduct performance evaluations of all its programs as well. Too bad GPRA has become a dead letter in the Trump Administration.
Although both the current reality and the historical context are working against evaluations of TRIO and other higher education programs, Clare McCann's report should be on every committee member's desk as Congress goes about reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. All HEA programs badly need better evaluation.
The other report of special note is "Ensuring Accountability and Effectiveness at the Office of Federal Student Aid," by Ben Miller of the Center for American Progress and Jason Delisle of the American Enterprise Institute.
The value of this report is that it pulls together the history of the Office of Federal Student Aid as a Performance Based Organization, or PBO. Of particular help is a discussion of the PBO concept and the other federal offices that became PBOs as well, and how they contrast with OSFA.
Again, however, the report could use broader context. It looks at OSFA in terms of its formal creation and organization as a PBO, more or less antiseptically. For a more complete understanding it would be good to look at the informal networks and communication channels that shaped the PBO from its beginning to its current condition. Such a look is beyond the scope and purpose of the CAP/AEI report, but the following observations hint at how this different lens could affect conclusions.
The CAP/AEI report suggests that excessive waste and fraud in student aid programs in "the 1990s" led to the creation of OSFA as a PBO in 1998. Actually, dysfunctional personnel networks were a more proximate tripwire.
To be sure, the early 1990s were plagued with for-profit school fraud and high student loan default rates, but those problems were quickly addressed by Secretary Richard Riley early in his tenure. Thousands of for-profit schools were eliminated from federal student aid eligibility and student loan defaults plummeted quickly as well. Much credit for this should go to Senator Sam Nunn, who held a series of high-profile hearings on these issues and to whom Secretary Riley gave his pledge to clean things up.
But even as Senator Nunn was pleased at the success of the Secretary's attack on fraud and waste, people in the Department's second tier of leadership were often unable to work out their differences as to how OSFA operated as a part of the larger Office of Postsecondary Education. OPE was headed by David Longanecker as Assistant Secretary, with Maureen McLaughlin as Deputy Assistant Secretary. Both had formidable policy and analytical strengths from their years at the Congressional Budget Office. OPE's Deputy Assistant Secretary for its OSFA component was Leo Kornfeld, whose orientation was operational, based on his many years in the student loan industry. The Clinton Administration in its second term saw the creation of a PBO as a way to resolve leadership conflicts by splitting OSFA off from OPE. OPE would still set policy, but a separate, independent OSFA would handle operations and regulatory compliance for student financial aid programs.
Not that the Department under Secretary Riley had resolved all student loan administration problems prior to the creation of the PBO in 1998. Its Direct Loan contractors in mid-decade fell seriously behind in loan consolidations, making applicants wait weeks and even months to consolidation their loans to qualify for lower interest rates and other benefits. The solution, however, was not the creation of the PBO; rather it was to allow FFEL lenders to consolidate Direct Loans into the FFEL program under the so-called Two-Way Loan Consolidation amendment that Congress approved. That created its own set of problems when FFEL entrepreneurs set up boiler-room operations to lure borrowers into FFEL loans not to relieve a consolidation backlog but to win federal FFEL subsidies. It was the Federal Trade Commission that finally took action against some of the worst of the FFEL operators who misused the Department's name and logo.
After the PBO was created legislatively, Greg Woods became its COO. Unfortunately -- Greg was a talented administrator without conflicts of interest -- he passed away soon after he took the reins at OSFA. His major accomplishment was to move OSFA physically to a better workplace, well distant from the rest of the Department of Education. We are left to wonder how the Woods PBO would have asserted its new independence in combating fraud and waste through statutory and regulatory compliance measures, which were now its primary bailiwick. Appointment of his successor was left to President Bush's Secretary of Education, Rod Paige, who chose Theresa Shaw, a former student loan industry executive, as the COO.
In the Shaw era, OSFA took not only its policy signals but also its compliance approach from Bush Administration political appointees. For example, in 2002 compliance questions appropriately raised of OSFA by FFEL lenders were passed on by OSFA personnel, inappropriately, to political officials, most notably to the office of Deputy Secretary William Hansen, who was officially recused from such decisions because he had been a leading industry lobbyist. In 2003, an OFSA unfavorable compliance review of a different lender was incorrectly reversed after the lender discussed the review with political appointees. (The original finding took four years to be restored.) In 2006, the Inspector General wrote a report condemning OSFA for its failure to exercise its compliance function properly. That same year, Assistant Secretary Sally Stroup at OPE gave inside advice to a lender's lobbyist as to how to deal with an upcoming IG audit.
These examples are merely illustrative of the many informal and extra-legal relationship networks that transcended the formal organizational boxes establishing the PBO legislatively.
Secretary Paige's successor, Margaret Spellings, did not extend Theresa Shaw's appointment as COO for another term. Among the reasons had to be OSFA's failure to police itself: one OSFA executive, Matteo Fontana, accepted stock from a company he was regulating. This was also a time when compliance efforts were so weak at OSFA that student financial aid officials at UT-Austin, Columbia, USC, and Johns Hopkins routinely accepted favors from student loan companies in exchange for recommending them to students as preferred lenders. At a loan servicer, compliance measures of the time coming from the Department were characterized as "pathetic" and "weak-minded."
In other words, looking at the PBO from the standpoint of lobbying and political networks leaves an even less flattering view than the CAP/AEI report, which itself was equivocal about the success of the PBO.
I cannot conclude, based on close personal observation over many years, that the PBO in its first decade of existence improved operations or compliance in any way compared to the former organizational arrangement. Of course we don't know what would have happened had OSFA not been re-created as a PBO, but it's hard to imagine a worse outcome. This is not to discredit some fine work within the PBO done by talented and dedicated employees, but I would also note that too many of the bonuses given out in the Shaw era were based on allowing the PBO to be undermined by political and industry revolving-door networks.
One bright spot for OSFA was the conversion of schools from FFEL to Direct Loans in 2010 and 2011. This accomplishment, however, was greatly aided from the outside by volunteers from Direct Loan schools who undertook the training of their counterparts at FFEL schools.
Regrettably, the second decade of the PBO's existence did not give its reputation an overall reprieve. If anything, the situation grew worse. The aftermath of the Great Recession saw a recurrence of for-profit school fraud that dwarfed what the Nunn Hearings uncovered in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, contracted to servicer FedLoan by the PBO, never got on track and is now a national scandal. The Ombudsman's office, housed in the PBO, never became effective as an advocate for borrowers. Only with the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau did borrowers gain a real voice in the halls of the federal bureaucracy. The CFPB sued a leading student loan servicer, Navient, for compliance failures that should have been corrected by the PBO. The list goes on and on, the failures escalating, the aroma of corruption permeating the fabric of the entire enterprise.
The CAP/AEI report is valuable as far as it goes. It deserves to be in the information binders of HEA reauthorizers as they look at OSFA as a PBO, but it should not be read as the last word until a more complete history of the PBO is fully told. While I endorse the report's recommendations for the HEA reauthorization, it is clear to me that another series of congressional oversight hearings, like those conducted by Senator Nunn's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, will be necessary if Congress and the public want real change. The sooner the better.
___________________________
Author's note: Much of the above OSFA/PBO history is public information and available from news accounts of the time. I also know it well because I was often literally in the room, as a civil servant working in the Office of Legislation and Congressional Affairs, from the time of Senator Nunn's conversations with Secretary Riley to the arrival of Secretary Paige. From there onward I pick up the thread of OSFA/PBO decision-making networks as a litigant against student loan fraud, based on discovery and depositions from 2001 onward. Much of that is also public information although little of it has been published.
Washington -- What would we do without Washington think-tanks? Their staffs provide scholarly analyses and recommendations on a wide variety of issues. They are important watchdogs of federal agencies.
Two recent think-tank reports on higher education issues are especially noteworthy, both for their insights and their limitations.
One is New America's report, "Closing the Evidence Gap: Doing More of What Works in Higher Education" by Clare McCann. She takes the Department of Education and the Congress to task for failing to evaluate programs like TRIO and GEAR UP. She identifies the lobby group that has successfully opposed evaluation of TRIO for decades. Too often such studies are loath to take on political realities. That is not the case here.
If anything, however, she could have gone further to give more context to these two programs. They are small potatoes when it comes to overall federal spending on higher education access and success. Pell and the Campus-Based programs, much larger, are not evaluated either, due to resistance not only in the higher education community, but also within the statutorily responsible evaluation office itself, the Department's independent Institute of Education Sciences. Although the situation is now improved with the appointment of Mark Schneider as IES director, when Grover Whitehurst was in the post he proposed an IES legislative authorization that omitted post-secondary programs entirely. Fortunately, the IES statute that Congress eventually authorized contains authority for IES to carry out post-secondary research and evaluation, even though there is currently little meaningful activity under the authority.
As Clare McCann correctly notes, the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) is applicable and places an obligation on the Department of Education to conduct performance evaluations of all its programs as well. Too bad GPRA has become a dead letter in the Trump Administration.
Although both the current reality and the historical context are working against evaluations of TRIO and other higher education programs, Clare McCann's report should be on every committee member's desk as Congress goes about reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. All HEA programs badly need better evaluation.
The other report of special note is "Ensuring Accountability and Effectiveness at the Office of Federal Student Aid," by Ben Miller of the Center for American Progress and Jason Delisle of the American Enterprise Institute.
The value of this report is that it pulls together the history of the Office of Federal Student Aid as a Performance Based Organization, or PBO. Of particular help is a discussion of the PBO concept and the other federal offices that became PBOs as well, and how they contrast with OSFA.
Again, however, the report could use broader context. It looks at OSFA in terms of its formal creation and organization as a PBO, more or less antiseptically. For a more complete understanding it would be good to look at the informal networks and communication channels that shaped the PBO from its beginning to its current condition. Such a look is beyond the scope and purpose of the CAP/AEI report, but the following observations hint at how this different lens could affect conclusions.
The CAP/AEI report suggests that excessive waste and fraud in student aid programs in "the 1990s" led to the creation of OSFA as a PBO in 1998. Actually, dysfunctional personnel networks were a more proximate tripwire.
To be sure, the early 1990s were plagued with for-profit school fraud and high student loan default rates, but those problems were quickly addressed by Secretary Richard Riley early in his tenure. Thousands of for-profit schools were eliminated from federal student aid eligibility and student loan defaults plummeted quickly as well. Much credit for this should go to Senator Sam Nunn, who held a series of high-profile hearings on these issues and to whom Secretary Riley gave his pledge to clean things up.
But even as Senator Nunn was pleased at the success of the Secretary's attack on fraud and waste, people in the Department's second tier of leadership were often unable to work out their differences as to how OSFA operated as a part of the larger Office of Postsecondary Education. OPE was headed by David Longanecker as Assistant Secretary, with Maureen McLaughlin as Deputy Assistant Secretary. Both had formidable policy and analytical strengths from their years at the Congressional Budget Office. OPE's Deputy Assistant Secretary for its OSFA component was Leo Kornfeld, whose orientation was operational, based on his many years in the student loan industry. The Clinton Administration in its second term saw the creation of a PBO as a way to resolve leadership conflicts by splitting OSFA off from OPE. OPE would still set policy, but a separate, independent OSFA would handle operations and regulatory compliance for student financial aid programs.
Not that the Department under Secretary Riley had resolved all student loan administration problems prior to the creation of the PBO in 1998. Its Direct Loan contractors in mid-decade fell seriously behind in loan consolidations, making applicants wait weeks and even months to consolidation their loans to qualify for lower interest rates and other benefits. The solution, however, was not the creation of the PBO; rather it was to allow FFEL lenders to consolidate Direct Loans into the FFEL program under the so-called Two-Way Loan Consolidation amendment that Congress approved. That created its own set of problems when FFEL entrepreneurs set up boiler-room operations to lure borrowers into FFEL loans not to relieve a consolidation backlog but to win federal FFEL subsidies. It was the Federal Trade Commission that finally took action against some of the worst of the FFEL operators who misused the Department's name and logo.
After the PBO was created legislatively, Greg Woods became its COO. Unfortunately -- Greg was a talented administrator without conflicts of interest -- he passed away soon after he took the reins at OSFA. His major accomplishment was to move OSFA physically to a better workplace, well distant from the rest of the Department of Education. We are left to wonder how the Woods PBO would have asserted its new independence in combating fraud and waste through statutory and regulatory compliance measures, which were now its primary bailiwick. Appointment of his successor was left to President Bush's Secretary of Education, Rod Paige, who chose Theresa Shaw, a former student loan industry executive, as the COO.
In the Shaw era, OSFA took not only its policy signals but also its compliance approach from Bush Administration political appointees. For example, in 2002 compliance questions appropriately raised of OSFA by FFEL lenders were passed on by OSFA personnel, inappropriately, to political officials, most notably to the office of Deputy Secretary William Hansen, who was officially recused from such decisions because he had been a leading industry lobbyist. In 2003, an OFSA unfavorable compliance review of a different lender was incorrectly reversed after the lender discussed the review with political appointees. (The original finding took four years to be restored.) In 2006, the Inspector General wrote a report condemning OSFA for its failure to exercise its compliance function properly. That same year, Assistant Secretary Sally Stroup at OPE gave inside advice to a lender's lobbyist as to how to deal with an upcoming IG audit.
These examples are merely illustrative of the many informal and extra-legal relationship networks that transcended the formal organizational boxes establishing the PBO legislatively.
Secretary Paige's successor, Margaret Spellings, did not extend Theresa Shaw's appointment as COO for another term. Among the reasons had to be OSFA's failure to police itself: one OSFA executive, Matteo Fontana, accepted stock from a company he was regulating. This was also a time when compliance efforts were so weak at OSFA that student financial aid officials at UT-Austin, Columbia, USC, and Johns Hopkins routinely accepted favors from student loan companies in exchange for recommending them to students as preferred lenders. At a loan servicer, compliance measures of the time coming from the Department were characterized as "pathetic" and "weak-minded."
In other words, looking at the PBO from the standpoint of lobbying and political networks leaves an even less flattering view than the CAP/AEI report, which itself was equivocal about the success of the PBO.
I cannot conclude, based on close personal observation over many years, that the PBO in its first decade of existence improved operations or compliance in any way compared to the former organizational arrangement. Of course we don't know what would have happened had OSFA not been re-created as a PBO, but it's hard to imagine a worse outcome. This is not to discredit some fine work within the PBO done by talented and dedicated employees, but I would also note that too many of the bonuses given out in the Shaw era were based on allowing the PBO to be undermined by political and industry revolving-door networks.
One bright spot for OSFA was the conversion of schools from FFEL to Direct Loans in 2010 and 2011. This accomplishment, however, was greatly aided from the outside by volunteers from Direct Loan schools who undertook the training of their counterparts at FFEL schools.
Regrettably, the second decade of the PBO's existence did not give its reputation an overall reprieve. If anything, the situation grew worse. The aftermath of the Great Recession saw a recurrence of for-profit school fraud that dwarfed what the Nunn Hearings uncovered in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, contracted to servicer FedLoan by the PBO, never got on track and is now a national scandal. The Ombudsman's office, housed in the PBO, never became effective as an advocate for borrowers. Only with the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau did borrowers gain a real voice in the halls of the federal bureaucracy. The CFPB sued a leading student loan servicer, Navient, for compliance failures that should have been corrected by the PBO. The list goes on and on, the failures escalating, the aroma of corruption permeating the fabric of the entire enterprise.
The CAP/AEI report is valuable as far as it goes. It deserves to be in the information binders of HEA reauthorizers as they look at OSFA as a PBO, but it should not be read as the last word until a more complete history of the PBO is fully told. While I endorse the report's recommendations for the HEA reauthorization, it is clear to me that another series of congressional oversight hearings, like those conducted by Senator Nunn's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, will be necessary if Congress and the public want real change. The sooner the better.
___________________________
Author's note: Much of the above OSFA/PBO history is public information and available from news accounts of the time. I also know it well because I was often literally in the room, as a civil servant working in the Office of Legislation and Congressional Affairs, from the time of Senator Nunn's conversations with Secretary Riley to the arrival of Secretary Paige. From there onward I pick up the thread of OSFA/PBO decision-making networks as a litigant against student loan fraud, based on discovery and depositions from 2001 onward. Much of that is also public information although little of it has been published.
Assessing Sen. Warren's Higher Education Plan
May, 2019
Washington -- Give Elizabeth Warren credit. She is the only presidential candidate in either party who is addressing the nation's student loan crisis realistically. I have differences with the details of her approach, but that must not overshadow her leadership. Warren deserves praise for three huge policy initiatives:
• She proposes help for millions of borrowers currently in inextricable student loan trouble (often not of their own making), in a way that would also help the nation's economy. Debt relief, through a means-tested approach, needs immediate action. In 2016, candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton wrongly neglected the distress of borrowers in favor of vague promises for future generations. Warren's loan cancellation plan for current borrowers, conversely, has now demanded even the attention of those who for years touted student loans as "good debt." The Urban Institute, for example, has begun seriously to analyze cancellation effects and has had to withdraw mistakes in its earlier papers. Economists are now looking more seriously about the positive, life-changing effects of current debt cancellation, as explained in a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
• She proposes restoration of bankruptcy protections for both federal and private student loan borrowers. Warren is a co-sponsor of Senator Dick Durbin's new restoration bill, the case for which has been spelled out well by Mark Huelsman of Demos. This is not a partisan issue; the companion bill in the House is led by Republican John Katko. Arguments against providing student loan borrowers the same bankruptcy rights as other borrowers have collapsed with the failure of programs that were said to preclude the need for student loan bankruptcy.
• She addresses demographic disparities in student loan burdens. The student loan crisis falls disproportionately on minorities and women. Warren's plan exposes this by showing the distribution of cancellation relief, a heretofore much-neglected topic. Also, by proposing that cancellation be paid for by an annual 2% wealth tax on those with net worth of over $50 million, Warren highlights the huge disparities between the few who are in the stratospheric reaches of wealth compared to millions of borrowers who are not, and knocks back arguments that her overall plan is regressive.
I must also note that Elizabeth Warren is without peer among the presidential candidates for her efforts to oversee the U.S. Department of Education more vigorously. Part of the student loan crisis is a result of ineptitude and corruption at the department. Warren is the founder of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
That said, I have some differences with the Warren plan as announced last month, which suffers from two inequities, individual and institutional.
Previously, I suggested that a means-tested, refundable federal tax credit would be more equitable for all students who went to college in the high-tuition era of the last two decades. It would avoid such problems as unfairness between those in similar economic circumstances who struggled mightily to pay off their loans and those who did not; between those who chose lower priced community colleges or less selective schools and those who did not; and between those who worked to try to pay for college over many years and those who did not. The tax credit could be called the "Tuition Premium Tax Credit," the benefits of which could be used to pay off student debt, or simply used by recipients to recover economically from the high price of college, however it affected them wherever they attended. Such a tax credit would also help remedy generational inequities. The boomer generation benefitted enormously from the long, low tuition era that made paying for college relatively easy. The 2017 tax cut piled more wealth on the boomer generation; it could be trimmed back with savings applied to generational and income-class equity.
I would also limit Warren's free college plan to two-year community colleges (actually first proposed by President Harry Truman). For public four-year colleges, a return to the Carnegie Commission's funding model would strike a reasonable balance between who pays and who should pay, so as not to make the free college aspect of the Warren plan regressive, as some have alleged. The Carnegie model also recognized the importance of private, non-profit institutions, a national resource that could be threatened under Warren's plan.
As to Warren's plan to increase Pell Grants, I'd put the funds instead toward a matching program, like SEOG, that would be more efficient and draw in much-needed state and institutional effort to help students avoid excessive debt. Historically, Pell Grants have not been effective in reducing borrowing. Requiring match would also eliminate many unscrupulous for-profit institutions from federal programs, a workable alternative to Warren's plan simply to make all for-profit institutions ineligible, although that aspect of her plan is also attractive. For-profit higher education is nothing less than a national scandal and one of the primary causes of the student loan crisis.
Finally, as to Warren's wealth tax, it is a good talking point to illustrate how inequitable our society has become in terms of wealth maldistribution, but as a practical matter there is a good case to be made that an effort to relieve student loan debt for those who most need it would go a long way toward paying for itself. Getting millions of borrowers back fully into the economy makes good economic sense.
I don't have a favorite 2020 presidential candidate, but Elizabeth Warren's higher education plan is a formidable offering. The cancellation proposal is getting much favorable attention in polls, even from those without loans. Other candidates should be taking note.
Washington -- Give Elizabeth Warren credit. She is the only presidential candidate in either party who is addressing the nation's student loan crisis realistically. I have differences with the details of her approach, but that must not overshadow her leadership. Warren deserves praise for three huge policy initiatives:
• She proposes help for millions of borrowers currently in inextricable student loan trouble (often not of their own making), in a way that would also help the nation's economy. Debt relief, through a means-tested approach, needs immediate action. In 2016, candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton wrongly neglected the distress of borrowers in favor of vague promises for future generations. Warren's loan cancellation plan for current borrowers, conversely, has now demanded even the attention of those who for years touted student loans as "good debt." The Urban Institute, for example, has begun seriously to analyze cancellation effects and has had to withdraw mistakes in its earlier papers. Economists are now looking more seriously about the positive, life-changing effects of current debt cancellation, as explained in a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
• She proposes restoration of bankruptcy protections for both federal and private student loan borrowers. Warren is a co-sponsor of Senator Dick Durbin's new restoration bill, the case for which has been spelled out well by Mark Huelsman of Demos. This is not a partisan issue; the companion bill in the House is led by Republican John Katko. Arguments against providing student loan borrowers the same bankruptcy rights as other borrowers have collapsed with the failure of programs that were said to preclude the need for student loan bankruptcy.
• She addresses demographic disparities in student loan burdens. The student loan crisis falls disproportionately on minorities and women. Warren's plan exposes this by showing the distribution of cancellation relief, a heretofore much-neglected topic. Also, by proposing that cancellation be paid for by an annual 2% wealth tax on those with net worth of over $50 million, Warren highlights the huge disparities between the few who are in the stratospheric reaches of wealth compared to millions of borrowers who are not, and knocks back arguments that her overall plan is regressive.
I must also note that Elizabeth Warren is without peer among the presidential candidates for her efforts to oversee the U.S. Department of Education more vigorously. Part of the student loan crisis is a result of ineptitude and corruption at the department. Warren is the founder of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
That said, I have some differences with the Warren plan as announced last month, which suffers from two inequities, individual and institutional.
Previously, I suggested that a means-tested, refundable federal tax credit would be more equitable for all students who went to college in the high-tuition era of the last two decades. It would avoid such problems as unfairness between those in similar economic circumstances who struggled mightily to pay off their loans and those who did not; between those who chose lower priced community colleges or less selective schools and those who did not; and between those who worked to try to pay for college over many years and those who did not. The tax credit could be called the "Tuition Premium Tax Credit," the benefits of which could be used to pay off student debt, or simply used by recipients to recover economically from the high price of college, however it affected them wherever they attended. Such a tax credit would also help remedy generational inequities. The boomer generation benefitted enormously from the long, low tuition era that made paying for college relatively easy. The 2017 tax cut piled more wealth on the boomer generation; it could be trimmed back with savings applied to generational and income-class equity.
I would also limit Warren's free college plan to two-year community colleges (actually first proposed by President Harry Truman). For public four-year colleges, a return to the Carnegie Commission's funding model would strike a reasonable balance between who pays and who should pay, so as not to make the free college aspect of the Warren plan regressive, as some have alleged. The Carnegie model also recognized the importance of private, non-profit institutions, a national resource that could be threatened under Warren's plan.
As to Warren's plan to increase Pell Grants, I'd put the funds instead toward a matching program, like SEOG, that would be more efficient and draw in much-needed state and institutional effort to help students avoid excessive debt. Historically, Pell Grants have not been effective in reducing borrowing. Requiring match would also eliminate many unscrupulous for-profit institutions from federal programs, a workable alternative to Warren's plan simply to make all for-profit institutions ineligible, although that aspect of her plan is also attractive. For-profit higher education is nothing less than a national scandal and one of the primary causes of the student loan crisis.
Finally, as to Warren's wealth tax, it is a good talking point to illustrate how inequitable our society has become in terms of wealth maldistribution, but as a practical matter there is a good case to be made that an effort to relieve student loan debt for those who most need it would go a long way toward paying for itself. Getting millions of borrowers back fully into the economy makes good economic sense.
I don't have a favorite 2020 presidential candidate, but Elizabeth Warren's higher education plan is a formidable offering. The cancellation proposal is getting much favorable attention in polls, even from those without loans. Other candidates should be taking note.
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