Gingrich and Paul agree that federal student loans should be phased out. (AP)
MANCHESTER, N.H.--New Hampshire college students graduate with the highest average debt in the country: a staggering $31,048 for the class of 2010,?according to a report by the Project on Student Debt. And tuition at the state's public universities?is among the highest in America, an average of more than $23,000 a year.
So when the Republican presidential candidates--and the national political press--are in New Hampshire this week in advance of the state's first-in-the-nation presidential primary on Tuesday, student activists plan to buttonhole the candidates and ask them tough questions about the high cost of college as well as income inequality and the influence of money on politics, Alex Freid, a student at the University of New Hampshire and member of the Occupy Durham (the city where the main UNH campus is located), told Yahoo News.
It's unclear how the candidates will answer. Many of them have not yet gone into detail about their ideas for the country's education system. But one issue unites most of the Republicans: getting the federal government out of education, which includes government loans to students.
Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul,?Rick Santorum and Rick Perry say that low-interest and subsidized federal loans are driving up the cost of college by allowing colleges to charge more because students have greater access to money to pay tuition and other expenses. Without these loans, they argue, colleges would be forced to cut costs.
Higher education officials disagree, saying that the cost of public college has skyrocketed in recent years because state legislatures have funded a smaller portion of university budgets as resources have been moved to health care and other priorities. And there's no proof that federal aid or loans are driving up college costs, according to several education department studies. (Neil McCluskey at the libertarian think tank Cato suspects aid does inflate costs, but that it's impossible to prove.) Other studies have noted that colleges have not become more efficient as their enrollment has grown over the past few decades,?leading to costly administrative bloat.
Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney have largely avoided the issue. Both say that improving the economy would be the fastest way to help indebted college graduates. The unemployment rate for college graduates is?currently half of what it is for those with just a high school education, and studies show that college graduates make significantly more money over their lifetimes. Recent college graduates, though, are facing a much tougher job market than before the recession, and a Northeastern University survey?suggests half of them are in jobs that don't require a college degree.
On the campaign trail, Gingrich and Perry have touted examples of how America could design a cheaper education system. Gingrich has mentioned the College of the Ozarks, a Christian not-for-profit school in Missouri where students are not allowed to take out federal loans yet graduate debt-free because of the school's mandatory work-study program. However,?two-thirds of the college's students receive federal Pell Grants, a program that would most likely shrink if the budget cuts promised by Gingrich and his fellow presidential hopefuls came to pass. Perry, meanwhile, has urged universities in his home state of Texas--whose funding was cut by $1 billion last year--to design a $10,000-a-year degree, including the cost of books, in part by moving classes online.
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