Fox News host Tucker Carlson floated the idea Monday on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that universities and their large endowments should shoulder the burden of repaying student loans, not students and their families.
Carlson opened the segment discussing a recent poll showing communism’s widespread popularity among millennials, calling it a “huge problem” that needs fixing. (RELATED: 1 In 3 Millennials See Communism As Favorable, Survey Finds)
“Believe it or not, it’s not the main problem,” he added, gearing up for his main point. “The main problem — the reason that capitalism increasingly is discredited and socialism is increasingly popular — is that our current system is making young people poor.”
Carlson continued,
Go to college, you’ll be successful if you do. But too often, that advice is outdated, if not an utter lie. Huge numbers of our kids wind up impoverished by the experience of college, their dreams thwarted forever. The reason for that is debt. 45 million Americans now labor under student loans. The average debt burden is $37,000 per person. That’s the price of a brand-new car. Imagine starting your first job with that hanging over you, and keep in mind, college debt isn’t like ordinary debt thanks to well-funded lobbying campaigns, student loans cannot be erased by bankruptcy. They last forever. Many of today’s college freshmen can expect to spend their working lives paying interest on loans in the end that didn’t help them at all.
Carlson pointed out the irony of the student debt crisis, namely that “the only people benefiting from this current system are on the far left: the smirking college presidents with multi-million dollar salaries. The authoritarian university administrators and the suddenly ubiquitous diversity and inclusion officers. The tenured professors of non-binary feminist poetry and other perverse and pointless fake academic disciplines.”
“As a group, these are without a question the least impressive people in this country,” he continued, “and yet they are the only ones coming out ahead in this deal. The are feasting on our children’s debt.”
He argued that plans, like that of Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, that would make college free for everyone are unrealistic and can actually, “make a terrible situation even worse.”
Instead, Carlson called for making the higher education institutions that had perpetuated “this scam” foot the bill.
“Harvard’s endowment is $40 billion. Yale’s endowment is $30 billion. Let’s start there,” he explained. “What’s clear is we need to move the crushing financial burden of student debt off the shoulders of middle-class families and 22-year-olds and back to the people who have gotten rich from it.”
“That’s an idea that every sensible person can support. In fact, there’s a big political payoff for any politician wise enough to adopt it. The candidate who promises to make colleges ease the student loan burden, without question, will be the next president of the United States.”