Tuition Bills Are Collapsing and the Government Accidentally Proved My Point

This Is My “I Told You So” Moment

I will not pretend to be humble about this. When I saw the headlines about small private colleges and liberal arts schools cutting tuition by $20,000 or more, I laughed out loud. Not a polite chuckle. A full, genuine laugh. Because I have been saying this exact thing would happen for years, and the financial and academic establishment spent that entire time calling people like me extreme.

So let me walk you through exactly what happened and why it matters to every family in America.

The Student Loan Scam Explained in Plain English

The higher education industrial complex sold America a lie for decades. The lie was that student loans were a benevolent tool designed to help working-class kids access opportunity. The reality is that student loans were a mechanism to funnel unlimited government-backed cash directly into the pockets of universities with zero accountability for outcomes.

Here is the dirty truth about how this scheme worked:

• Student loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, making them unlike virtually every other debt product in existence
• That carve-out is a government subsidy disguised as a lending product
• Because colleges knew students could borrow without limit at suppressed interest rates, there was zero competitive pressure to keep costs down
• Tuition exploded, administrative bloat exploded, and useless degree programs multiplied because someone else was always picking up the tab

If these loans were priced the way a genuinely risky unsecured loan should be priced, we are talking 18 to 20 percent interest rates. Credit card territory. At those rates, the student loan market essentially disappears. And the moment it disappears, colleges have to compete on price like every other business in America.

What Happens When You Remove the Subsidy

They capped borrowing. Tuition fell. The end.

It really is that simple. Every complicated academic paper, every think tank report, every panel of experts who spent careers theorizing about why college costs kept rising somehow missed the most obvious economic principle in existence. When you subsidize something, you make it more expensive. When you remove the subsidy, market forces take over.

The institutions now cutting tuition are not doing it out of generosity. They are doing it because they have to. Because without an unlimited pipeline of federally backed loan money propping up artificially inflated price tags, they cannot fill seats. And empty seats mean empty budgets.

The Uncomfortable Part Nobody Wants to Say

Some of these colleges should close. I will say it directly because too many people in media dance around it.

• A degree that does not produce a return on investment is not an asset, it is a liability
• An institution that cannot survive without government-subsidized debt flowing to its students is not a functioning business, it is a ward of the state
• The free market closing bad businesses is not a tragedy, it is the system working exactly as designed

Government involvement in markets does not make products cheaper. Name one example where it has. Healthcare. Housing. Education. The government steps in with promises of affordability and prices go vertical every single time.

What is happening in higher education right now is painful, necessary, and long overdue. And the lesson extends far beyond college campuses. Every time you see a government subsidy propping up a market, understand that you are looking at artificially inflated prices and misallocated resources. The correction always comes eventually. The only question is how much damage gets done before it does.