Far be it from me to
criticize Paul Krugman’s advice on economic issues. After all, Krugman received
the Nobel Prize in economics, and I did not.
(I may have gotten the Boy Scout merit badge in Personal Management.)
Krugman, writing in today’s
New York Times, reviewed the dire
situation of many college graduates. As Krugman rightly pointed out, many are
saddled with huge student loans and can’t find jobs.
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| Personal Management Merit Badge |
With
all due respect, Mr. Krugman’s advice is a little thin. Expanding student aid will not do American
young people any good if it is disbursed in the form of student loans that they
are unable to pay back. And pouring more
money into an unreformed higher education system is a waste of resources.
The
Cal State student hunger-strikers have put their finger on the problem. We need to freeze college tuition and reform
the universities. We can start the
reform effort by cutting back on the exorbitant salaries our universities pay
senior executives and administrators.
Of
course there are lots of other things we can do to straighten out the
student-loan mess and help young people obtain college experiences that will
help them get good jobs. But simply
saying we should expand student aid, as Mr. Krugman suggested in today’s New York Times, merely endorses the
status quo. That is how we got into this
mess, and we now have one trillion dollars of outstanding student-loan
indebtedness and 37 million student loan debtors.
References
Krugman, P. (2012, April 30, 2012). Wasting our minds. New York Times.
