Student loan program allows colleges to inflate prices
Columnist Maureen Downey’s “Helping the many Georgians with student debt load helps state,” Opinion, Sept. 6, is an elitist justification of her personal entitlement attitude.
It’s not about debt reallocation. She spent $6K on an Ivy League graduate program that has ballooned to $81K today. Somehow this extrapolates to what everyone deserves now?
That was probably an excellent value in the ‘70s, but it is a complete waste of money today. The problem with the student loan program is that it enables colleges with grossly inflated price tags to enroll students who can never repay the loans.
What’s the cost of the same program at Georgia State? Student loan maximums should be tied to the student’s ability to repay the loan (engineering, nursing, legal, etc. can get higher loans). Too low for Columbia University? Let them use their $14 billion endowment. Oh, and PPP is a Straw Man logical fallacy.
BRIAN GRAY, PEACHTREE CORNERS
College endowments should be used to lower student costs
I’m so tired of hearing people who went to college 50 to 60 years ago complain about the minuscule amount of partial college loan forgiveness recently provided by the Democrats. “Why can’t everybody pay their own debts like we did?”
Guess what, folks? Public college education costs 10 to 20 times as much as it used to. You should be grateful, as I am, that those college costs were so much lower when we went to school, and we could pay for our educations with a summer job. Most states back then provided a much larger amount of financial aid to state universities to keep college costs affordable.
You should instead be complaining about the massive taxpayer-supported endowments accumulated by many universities. The University of Georgia recently reported an endowment of $1.5 billion. Why aren’t these massive endowments being used to lower costs to students so they don’t have to go into lifelong debt to afford an education instead of funding massive, ego-driven building programs?
JAMES R. THOMSON, MARIETTA
