Freedom

Opinion by Emily Crane
 

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.

“Accountability is a two-way street. As we push to hold student borrowers to account, we will also push colleges to be responsible and transparent.”

McMahon insisted the administration wasn’t enforcing the collections to be “unkind” — as she blasted former President Joe Biden for dangling “the carrot of loan forgiveness in front of young voters” during his successful 2020 election campaign.

Student loan collections were initially paused under Trump’s first administration in 2020 as a COVID relief measure, but Biden later extended the temporary deferment program, McMahon said, noting that the Democratic president “never had the authority to forgive student loans across the board.”

The move, she argued, only allowed students to “rack up a massive debt that is now long past due.”

“I am announcing the end of this dishonest and irresponsible policy. We will conform the department’s repayment options to federal court decisions and end the Biden-era practice of zero-interest, zero-accountability forbearances that are pushing borrowers into loan delinquency and default,” she said.

“On May 5, we will begin the process of moving roughly 1.8 million borrowers into repayment plans and restart collections of loans in default. Borrowers who don’t make payments on time will see their credit scores go down, and in some cases, their wages automatically garnished.

“Why? Not because we want to be unkind to student borrowers. Borrowing money and failing to pay it back isn’t a victimless offense. Debt doesn’t go away; it gets transferred to others. If borrowers don’t pay their debts to the government, taxpayers do,” McMahon added.

She stressed, too, that student loans needed to be paid back because they weren’t like regular consumer loans, such as a mortgage or a car payment.

“We are committed to ensuring that borrowers are paying back their loans, that they are fully supported in doing so, and that colleges can’t create such a massive liability for students and their families, jeopardizing their ability to achieve the American dream,” McMahon said.

In announcing the new measure, the education secretary had earlier criticized Biden’s efforts to cancel billions of dollars in student loan debt, several of which were blocked by federal courts in 2023. 

The Education Department said some 42.7 million borrowers who owe more than $1.6 trillion in student debt are pushing the nation’s federal student loan portfolio toward a “fiscal cliff.”

The agency also noted that more than 5 million borrowers haven’t made a single monthly payment in over 360 days and “many” haven’t in “more than 7 years.”