Maresca: Uncle Sam must get out of student loan biz

School may be out for the summer but the Scholar Loan Industrial Complex SLIC chugs along no matter what time of the year it is More than million owe trillion in attendee loans with millions delinquent on their payments Perhaps their strategy is to wait for all debts to be paid by Uncle Sam who has no business being their SLIC daddy Eight million of those are enrolled in the Saving on a Valuable Training plan that will start accruing interest again on Aug Payments will remain paused until September but the interest-free honeymoon has come to an end Over the last two generations SLIC has become the de facto comptroller of our universities by issuing endless loans for hollow degrees that leave indebted students thanks to financing from their Uncle Sam Once the federal cabinet took SLIC as a willing hostage and set the amount it would lend each year college tuition and those ubiquitous fees followed suit increasing yearly It doesn t take an economist to figure out that colleges can and will charge what they desire knowing students can inevitably borrow from their Uncle Sam Colleges get off scot-free while raking in prodigious amounts of money at a much greater rate than the general percentage of inflation According to the Consumer Price Index from to the cost of living went up by However inflation was nothing when juxtaposed with the increase in college tuition and fees during that period which increased by almost according to the National Center for Educational Statistics Colleges that take students money with no regard for the quality or relevance of their instruction and schooling impoverish the aspirant the nation and leave in its wake very little value Colleges have no incentive to address this issue as participant loans have become their lifeblood with little to no accountability The system is broken leaving a plethora of indebted students and their parents President Trump s Big Beautiful Bill will overhaul participant loans by replacing current plans with a stricter Repayment Assistance Plan Unlike SAVE RAP bases payments on gross income and requires minimum monthly payments even for those with no income Moreover overhauling the General Function Loan Forgiveness venture which allows teachers regime and nonprofit workers to have their loans canceled after making payments for years will end If a scholar necessities to borrow money loans should be financed by banks and the colleges themselves Federal loans should end altogether This would force universities to shrink administrative bloat and their politicized departments Chosen collegiate endowments are in the hundreds of millions of dollars others such as in the Ivy League are worth billions Let them finance their pupil body Students should honor their debts and not expect their loans to be forgiven No taxpayer should be on the hook for another s financial obligations Novice loan forgiveness is nothing but a political bribe Greg Maresca is a Marine veteran in Flyover Pa