Have the universities spent their extra cash on an enhanced educational experience for students, by, say, hiring more faculty staff? Dream on. Go to any elite campus and you will see that a good portion has been spent on luxury dining and other facilities. But the largest share has gone to administrators, who now dominate college life. According to Priced Out, a report from the National Association of Scholars, the total number of administrators and staff grew by 50 per cent from 1987 to 2018, led by an almost doubling of executives and professionals. This explosion of administration includes the creation of an army of diversity bureaucrats, who police students’ behaviour and punish them for deviating from orthodoxies on race and gender.
Biden’s student loan cancellation makes perfect sense when you consider what the Democrats have become. The greatest beneficiaries of the loan cancellation are under 40, white, well-off, with graduate degrees – in other words, Twitter progressives. And the debt cancellation will perpetuate a higher-education administrative class that has turned universities into sites of activism and indoctrination. It’s a woke racket, an unholy alliance of government money and ideology.
Biden’s student-loan move may prove unconstitutional, as even some allies have warned. Signing away $300 billion without Congressional approval is indeed questionable. Some have suggested that Biden knows this, but doesn’t care – that his debt cancellation is a cynical giveaway to secure votes before the midterm elections.
But whether genuine or cynical, Biden’s plan shows how insular and narrow the Democratic Party has become.
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