Subsidizing Educational Costs

                There is much talk about the cost of higher education and many questions about the worth of college education. The Heritage Foundation published an interested article titled “Big Debt, Little Study: What Taxpayers Should Know About College Students’ Time Use.” The article includes much data and several charts. I will include a few paragraphs but encourage you to read the entire article.

                “There is an additional consequence to taxpayer-subsidized federal student loans. The average full-time college student spends only 2.76 hours per day on all education-related activities. This helps explain why most full-time students today do not graduate in four years and rack up increasingly high load debt during their extended enrollment. Taxpayers, who are increasingly on the hook for borrower defaults and load forgiveness programs, deserve to know what their tax dollars subsidize.”

                I always stressed the importance of education with my children. They worked and/or took out student loans, but they knew the responsibility to repay those loans was on their shoulders. Most of my children completed their college educations in four years and paid off any remaining loans as quickly as possible. I consider their degrees to be their accomplishments. They accepted the responsibility and did well. I am positive that they all had fun while in college, but they also invested numerous hours each day on their educations. I know a lot of young adults who graduate from college and do it in four years. There must be a huge number of students who invest less than three hours per day on their education!

                After providing much information, the article concludes with these two paragraphs. “The limited amount of time spent engaged in education-related activities on average suggests that, for some students, the amount of debt accumulated finances a significant amount of non-education hours. When loans are forgiven, then, both education and non-education time is financed by taxpayers. Although numerous exogenous factors play into time to degree, such as when courses are offered and the mitigating circumstances of individual students, time-use data suggest that taxpayers end up generously subsidizing the non-education time of many college students.

                “An examination of the typical college student’s day reveals that the average full-time college student spends only 2.76 hours per day on all education-related activities. With the federal government today originating and managing 93 percent of all student loans, these data add to questions about the type of time use federal assistance is subsidizing. Taxpayers deserve to know.”

                Do you think it is fair for taxpayers to be subsidizing college expenses? How do you feel about subsidizing non-education expenses?