If you’ve ever wondered why so many of today’s American college students seem to live in a self-delusional world where they take little personal responsibility for anything that goes wrong in their lives, you don’t have to look any further than the professors who teach them.
In a recent op-ed column in the New York Times, Susan M. Dynarski, a professor of education, public policy and economics at the University of Michigan, takes the Trump Administration to task for its failure to take the proper steps, in Ms. Dynarski’s eyes, to fix the student debt problem, as if Donald Trump himself caused the crisis.
Nowhere in her lengthy critique does she ever address head-on the real culprits in the student debt crisis: the government agency that made these loans in the first place, and the colleges and universities that have exploited these loans in order to drive up the price of higher education, forcing millions of students and their parents into debt if they want to attend college.
First, she says, “the Education Department has weakened accountability for the companies that administer student loans,” specifically calling out Navient, formerly a part of Sallie Mae. Now privatized, Navient is the largest servicer of government student loans. As such, Dynarski says, “companies like Navient are the face of the student loan system, and often the source of enormous frustration for borrowers.” Continue reading "Talk About Chutzpah"