Education Secretary Linda McMahon, appointed by President Donald Trump, penned a scathing op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.
McMahon exposed the ways in which everyone but the students benefited from the student loan forgiveness policies of Joe Biden’s administration.
McMahon’s piece, titled “Accountability Returns to Student Loans,” in the Journal pulls no punches. She argues that Biden’s approach enriched colleges while leaving students in debt.
She highlighted the structural issues with student loans. McMahon wrote, “Student loans must always be paid back because they are unlike other types of consumer loans.”
“If a borrower stops paying a mortgage or a car payment, he will go into foreclosure or find his car repossessed,” she continued. “Student loans have no collateral.”
“It is impossible to repossess a college degree,” McMahon noted. “That’s why they are very rarely discharged even in bankruptcy.”
She called this a “hard truth” for borrowers. But she also turned her fire on universities, accusing them of exploiting the system.
“Colleges and universities call themselves nonprofits,” McMahon wrote, “but for years they have profited massively off the federal subsidy of loans.”
She pointed to their practices of “hiking tuition and piling up multibillion-dollar endowments.” Meanwhile, students “graduate six figures in the red.”
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McMahon cited a 2015 study to back her claim. It found that “for every dollar of increased federal caps on subsidized loans, colleges raised tuition by 60 cents.”
She criticized universities for offering “worthless” degrees. “Colleges continue to accept students to these programs and encourage them to borrow to pay for them,” she wrote.
McMahon emphasized fairness in her approach.
“Accountability is a two-way street,” she wrote, promising to hold both borrowers and colleges responsible.
“As we push to hold student borrowers to account,” she added, “we will also push colleges to be responsible and transparent.”
She also took aim at Biden’s policies. “President Biden never had the authority to forgive student loans across the board,” McMahon wrote.
She noted the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against Biden’s plan. “But for political gain, he dangled the carrot of loan forgiveness in front of young voters,” she said.
Biden kept a “temporary Covid-era deferment program” in place, McMahon explained. This allowed students to “rack up a massive debt that is now long past due.”
The New York Post reported on McMahon’s broader push for accountability.
She’s also ending Biden-era deferments that let borrowers skip payments for years.
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