Progressive Politics

Just make universities public and they get funded by the tax payers directly.

Public universities are cheaper than private, but still too expensive to pay for using saving from a minimum wage summer job. There is no doubt that tuition costs are inflated, but the idea of how you make schools charge less money is complicated.

The Trump administration is claiming that reducing the amount of money students are allowed to borrow from the government will somehow force universities to lower their costs. In reality it's simply creating a bigger divide in education based on socioeconomic factors, and increasing the amount of private debt students are forced to take on if their family cannot cover the cost of tuition.

Universities in the U.S. are typically portrayed by the right as elitist and left-wing institutions that exist to indoctrinate young minds with marxist ideas. However, many of the right's most vocal "anti-elitists" (Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, Adrian Vermeule, even Donald Trump himself) hold degrees from the most prestigious institutions within the United States.

Despite their leftists reputation, the board of trustees that actually govern public and private higher learning institutions in the U.S., are often made up of wealthy and well connected right-leaning individuals.

In Bed with the Right does a really good podcast episode on Boards of Trustees, but my main point is that (as is the case with the majority of problems in the U.S.), when you ask a question like "why does it have to be so expensive/complicated?" The answer is that these overly complicated systems are often not a consequence of incompetence or poor planning. They're the very intentional results of a country that has been locked in a never ending struggle between democracy and oligarchy since the very beginning.

It's no accident that the changes Trump is making will not result in universities suddenly offering cheaper tuition, or students taking on less debt to get an education. It's the system working as it was intended. It just makes it more believable to have an incompetent buffoon serving as the public face behind "failed" policy.

Many of the poorest and uneducated Americans voted for him, and they make for great photo ops when they cheer loudly at his rallies. Many of the wealthiest Americans with degrees from the "elite" institutions he so often attacks, were the ones who quietly invested their own money and paid for those rallies.