Elizabeth Warren, a tenured celebrity professor who jumped into politics, knows exactly why student loan debt is so high. Harvard Law paid Warren $350,000 to teach a single course. When Scott Brown brought it up during a debate about student loans, she protested. "I want to talk about the issues. Senator Brown wants to launch attacks."
But Warren's outrageous compensation is the issue. Harvard pays the adjuncts who teach many of its undergraduate classes an average of $11,037. Elizabeth Warren, who likes comparing the salary of a company's employees to its CEO's, isn't comparing the $429,981 that Harvard had paid her before she ran for office to an adjunct's salary. And unlike a CEO, all Warren did was show up for a little bit and then go back to her real business as a lawyer and government consultant.
The price of celebrity professors is paid for by student loans. The successful celebrity professors go on to a career in politics condemning Republicans for not caring enough about student loans.
At the modern university, the tenured celebrity professor who doesn't teach and gets paid is the 1 percent and the adjunct that teaches, but is unlikely to ever get tenure or a decent paycheck, is the 99 percent.
From 2001 to 2011 the number of administrators increased 50% faster than faculty. Faculty members, many of whom like big government in theory, are discovering that bureaucracy has an unstoppable moment. True to their radical roots, angry professors and adjuncts frame the issue as one of labor relations and bargaining power. Like Obama and Warren, they avoid dealing with the technical issues of why it's happening and skip straight to the "power to the people" chants.
The left's inability to understand any issue in any terms other than class warfare led it to frame the student loan debate as an attack on for-profit lenders and for-profit schools. (It's easy to understand why for-profit colleges have higher rates of loan defaults when looking at their student populations.) The rise of college administrators was driven by government regulations. The more colleges depended on the government to maintain their industry, the more they catered to government. The modern university isn't run by donors, by student demand or even by its endless ranks of administrators. Like most government subsidized industries, it is run by the government.
Normal businesses have a profit motive for controlling the growth of their internal bureaucracy. The profit motive of universities lies in expanding their bureaucracy to better interact with their government masters. The very business of student loans increases the size of university administrations even while the cost of that administration increases the size of student loans.
In universities, as in their government templates, bureaucracy, regulation and spending feed off each other. Regulation results in more bureaucracy and more bureaucracy results in more regulation until the system can no longer fulfill its default function.
That state was already reached long ago in the most broken public school systems.
In Newark's broken school system, there is an administrator to every six students. The institutions of higher learning with their swollen administrator ratios are following that same model. The administrators of every indebted, over-bureaucratized and overpriced college know that just as in the Newark school system, the bill will eventually be passed to taxpayers.
Like the the allied financial institutions feeding off the debt they create, they are too big to fail.
Tinkering with student loans provides a slight temporary benefit to students while protecting the corrupt system. Every liberal welfare policy uses clients as human shields, but keeps most of the money that is meant to go to them. Student loan reform uses students as human collateral for the expropriated money that will go to the system that exploits them.
The only way to reduce the trillion dollar mountain of student loan debt is by reforming higher education. Anything else is another cynical gambit by millionaire leftists who use inequality as a political weapon while denying the equality of merit that made higher education into the great equalizer to those who needed it the most.