Why should taxpayers subsidize student loans?

Republicans and Democrats alike feel so intimidated by the brute political power of college students and their families that no one will point out it’s the beneficiaries themselves who ought to cough up the extra money. It’s not unreasonable to suggest that they do so when interest rates revert to their normal, pre-2007 level on July 1st—especially since those students aren’t obligated to begin making those interest payments or retiring their principal until they’ve completed their education or dropped out of school. In effect, our leaders suggest that future millionaire attorneys who graduate from Harvard Law School (as both Obama and Romney did) ought to get reduced payments on their student loans at the ultimate expense of all taxpayers—including janitors who toil away at the very Ivy League campus where the two presidential candidates once matriculated…

And there’s scant justification for the government subsidizing decisions like those by Barack Obama to attend Columbia (as an undergraduate) and Harvard (for law school) rather than less-expensive schools. For instance, Mitt Romney managed to build a decent future for himself with an undergraduate degree from Brigham Young University, where even today tuition charges amount to less than one-tenth than those at Columbia, Obama’s alma mater.

To the president (and to many others, no doubt) the value of an Ivy League education might justify any additional cost, but why not place those costs on the people who chose to incur them and who benefit most directly? While the value of my own Yale degree might be greater to me than the value of my wife’s much-less-expensive UCLA degree is to her, there’s no evidence at all that a costly Ivy League credential somehow provides more substantial benefits to the nation at large.