Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), a potential 2016 presidential candidate, recently argued that Congress should hike taxes on families and small businesses making more than $1 million, then use the tax revenue to let debt-ridden students refinance their college loans.
As a progressive redistribution scheme it’s rather ingenious: It allows the government to take money from private individuals and businesses and give it to other businesses (i.e., college and universities), all while giving the impression of helping another group of private individuals (i.e., students who take indebt themselves by taking out college loans). Warren’s proposal is an brilliant blend of cronyism, special interest pandering, and “soak the rich” class envy – which is why it has a high likelihood of becoming law.
But if we look past the proposal we discovers something else that is fueling the student loan debt “crisis.” Whenever a nanny state solution like this is proposed, we should ask why the government is needed to serve as a governess. In this case, it appears the government is being asked to be a surrogate parent because of the failings of actual parents.
According to a study by sociologists at Rice University, college students whose parents are not married to each other face significantly heavier financial burdens for the simple reason that married parents, relative to other parents, contribute significantly more to their children’s college education:
Married parents not only contributed more in absolute terms to their children’s education than divorced parents ($4,700 median amount per year vs. $1,500 per year; p<.001) but also gave a larger proportion of their income to their children’s education (8 percent vs. 6 percent, p<.05). Married parents also outscored remarried parents in absolute ($4,700 per year vs. $2,490; p<.001) and proportional terms (8 percent of income vs. 5 percent; p<.001). Moreover, married parents covered a significantly greater proportion of their children’s financial needs, as defined by the cost of the college in which they are enrolled minus aid. Even as children of divorced and remarried parents were found to have significantly lower levels of financial need, married parents nonetheless covered 77 percent of the financial need of their children, whereas divorced parents covered just 42 percent of the financial need of their children (p<.001) and remarried parents 53 percent (p<.05). Using ordinary least-square regressions to predict parental contributions, the researchers found that parental marital status even trumped parental education and income as the determining factor.
The study notes that divorced and remarried parents who make $70,000 a year are predicted to contribute less toward their children’s college expenses than married parents who make only $40,000 per year. Is it really surprising, then, that when parents won’t contribute to the own children’s education that the students turn to Uncle Sam for help?
