(From Forbes.com):
By Thomas K. Lindsay
Last week, President Obama convened a “Summit on College Opportunity.” The gathering at the White House focused on “supporting colleges to work together to dramatically improve persistence and increase college completion.” For his part, the President lamented that “higher education increasingly feels out of reach.”
True enough. Nationwide, college tuitions have increased 440 percent over the last 25 years—faster than increases in both the Consumer Price Index (the measure of general inflation) and health care costs over the same period. To attempt to pay for these historic price increases, students and their parents have amassed 1.1 trillion dollars in student loan debt, which, for the first time in history, now exceeds total national credit card debt.
Were good intentions sufficient, we might be more confident that the President’s efforts to address the college affordability and student loan debt crises would bear fruit. Instead, one of the key elements in his project to bring down college costs—student loan forgiveness—promises only to exacerbate the problem. CONTINUE READING HERE