Dr. Richard Vedder
Fox Business host Stuart Varney interviewed Dr. Richard Vedder, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Economics at Ohio University, in a segment headlined “Government largely to blame for surging college tuition?”
Varney asked Vedder about the impact of the government on the rising cost of a college education and about his new book Restoring the Promise: American Higher Education Today.
“I think the evidence is pretty clear. The student loan programs have pushed tuition fees up dramatically over what they would have been in the absence of those programs,” Vedder said. “My estimate is that fees are about twice as high as they would have been if we had not had these programs, which means that people are paying 30-, 40-, $50 thousand instead of 10-, 15-, $20,000 to go to school. In some cases even more.”
About forgiving student debt, Vedder commented, “You would be rewarding people, in some cases, who have not been making payments all along, and you would be punishing people who have diligently paid off their loans. You would be rewarding many people who are comparatively well-off financially, not the poor.”
Vedder noted that “63 percent of student load debt is held by people in the upper half of the income distribution, so this is not really a move to help the poor and the oppressed so much as sort of a populist move that will give something to everyone.”
Watch the interview on Fox Business.
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