President Trump’s education boss Linda McMahon has defended the administration’s decision to resume student loan debt collections — insisting that greedy colleges have “profited massively” from Biden-era forgiveness measures.
The Department of Education announced Monday it would start recouping federal student repayments again from May 5 from the roughly 5.3 million borrowers who are currently in default on their loans.
In a fiery Wall Street Journal op-ed addressing the move, the education secretary blamed the Biden administration and universities for making “empty promises to students while pocketing their loan dollars.”
“Colleges and universities call themselves nonprofits, but for years they have profited massively off the federal subsidy of loans, hiking tuition and piling up multibillion-dollar endowments while students graduate six figures in the red,” McMahon wrote.
“A widely cited 2015 study found that for every dollar of increased federal caps on subsidized loans, colleges raised tuition by 60 cents,” she continued.
“Many of the degree-granting programs that qualify for student loans are worthless on the job market, but colleges continue to accept students to these programs and encourage them to borrow to pay for them.