How Doubling The Student Loan Interest Rate Hurts The United States

Josh Sager | The Progressive Cynic | July 2, 2013

University graduates are as vital a resource for the United States as anything that is mined, extracted, or farmed from nature. Without a well educated population, high-skilled jobs and extremely profitable research simply cannot occur in a country, thus the maintenance of a highly skilled work-pool is in the vital self-interest of every country. High-skilled workers not only draw investments in research and development, but are paid enough for their work that they become a significant portion of the economy’s buying power. In short, there is a very strong public interest for incentivizing intelligent students to aspire to a college education.

While educated students are a very valuable resource, a college education is a very expensive proposition to students. Inflation in the cost of a college education—even in public universities, which were designed to be affordable—has created a situation where over 2/3 of American students graduate with significant student loan debts.