How Nationalizing Student Tuition Loans Radicalized America
“Well, I guess the Communists know that the old people living in America today are not going to make the revolution. They are not the people who count. They count on the young people, and those who control the youth are the people who control the future of this country.”
Former Communist Bella V. Dodd, before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1953[1]
In 2010, President Obama nationalized student tuition loans by making the government the “sole provider” of government-backed college tuition loans. By doing so, Obama effectively eliminated banks as the conduit of choice for government-backed tuition-loan financing. Similarly, when Obama pushed for the government to be the Obamacare to be the “single-payer” of a nationalized health care system, the obvious consequence would be to eliminate employer-sponsored and insurance company-provided health insurance from the market.
As a one-time communist Bella Dodd made clear in her 1953 HUAC testimony that revolution starts by indoctrinating the youth. Obama appears to have understood the operative principle here: namely, what the government funds, the government controls. The Supreme Court memorialized this principle in Rust v. Sullivan, 500 U.S. 173 (1991). In Rust v. Sullivan, an abortion case, the Supreme Court held organizations receiving federal grants under the Public Health Service Act could not refuse to support abortion as a method of family planning, despite First Amendment free-speech protections.
On March 30, 2010, Obama signed the Health Care and Education Act charging the U.S. Department of Education to make 100 percent of all government-funded college loans, effective on July 1 of that year. In 2010, student loan debt totaled $760 billion. In 2022, the total outstanding student loan debt more than doubled to a record $1.7 trillion. A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 2017 found that tuition increases for all students is associated with the expansion of student loans by as much as 60 cents per dollar. Put simply, “more federal aid to students enables colleges to raise tuition more.” While college has gotten more expensive, colleges and universities have utilized the increased revenue to flourish into today’s bastion of critical-theory-driven neo-Marxist political correctness. In 2018, Mitchell Langbert, an associate professor at Brooklyn College, published a study concluding that the political affiliations of faculty members at 51 of the 66 liberal-arts colleges ranked by U.S. News in 2017 were decidedly left-leaning. Langbert found that Democrats dominate most faculties, with none of the 51 colleges having on the faculty more Republicans than Democrats, and over a third of them with no Republican faculty at all.
Since the student protests against the Vietnam war in the 1960s and 70s, college students have been able to get degrees in Hispanic Studies, Women’s Studies and African American studies. The developing theme was that the United States is a racist, imperialist state that has colonized minorities by denying equal rights. Today, the Neo-Marxist critical theory classes that dominate higher education have indoctrinated a generation of students into a hate-America agenda. In 2017, the governing board of the American College Personnel Association (ACPA) adopted the following theme for their annual conference: “Strategic Imperative for Racial Justice and Decolonization.” Talking points prepared for the ACPA’s meeting included the following: “Racism and colonization are real, present, enduring, intersectional, and systematic forms of oppression,” and “Advocacy and social justice require us to work to dismantle racism and colonialization in higher education.” Conservative students on college campuses risk being harassed by the left’s intolerance of “offensive speech,” ready to charge as a “micro-aggression” the use of traditional pronouns that fail to acknowledge the politics of gender versus sex. According to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 2021 found the unemployment among recent college graduates exceeds that pf the general population, while about 41 percent of recent graduates and 33.8 percent of all college graduates today are underemployed, working in jobs that do not require a college degree.
Despite Obama’s dramatic increase in student tuition loans, radical socialist Democrats like Rep. Bernie Sanders (Independent, VT) campaigned for president in 2020, arguing for eliminating existing student debt to provide free college education for everyone. “I believe that education is the future for this country, and that is why I believe that we must make public colleges and universities tuition free and eliminate student debt, and we do that by placing a tax on Wall Street,” Sanders said in the first round of the Democratic Debate in Miami, Florida, on June 27, 2019.
While President Biden has not endorsed free-college-for-everyone, he has considered forgiving $10,000 of student debt as a move to mobilize the Democratic Party voter base in the upcoming 2022 mid-term elections. How did we come as a nation to this point in American history? The radical new left and their allies in the mainstream media just assume it is politically correct and eminently reasonable to assume the taxpayer should fund institutions of higher education dedicated to indoctrinating youth to destroy all that is traditional about this country, including God and the Constitution?
Since 2004, Jerome R. Corsi has published over 30 books on economics, history, and politics, including two #1 New York Times bestsellers. In 1972, he received his Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University. His doctoral dissertation in 1972 was entitled Prior Restraint, Prior Punishment, and Political Dissent: A Moral and Legal Evaluation. His book, Volume I, in his Great Awakening Trilogy, The Truth About Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change: Exposing Climate Lies in an Age of Disinformation, received highly positive reviews from prominent climate scientists. Volume II, The Truth About Neo-Marxism, Cultural Maoism, and Anarchy: Exposing Woke Insanity in an Age of Disinformation, was published in October 2023. Dr. Corsi has decided to come out of retirement. He has resumed podcasting weekdays on his new website TheTruthCentral.com.
[1] “Testimony of Bella V. Dodd, June 17, 1953,” Investigation of Communist Activities in the Columbus, Ohio, Area, Hearings Before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Eighty-Third Congress, First Session, June 17 and 18, 1953 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1953), p. 1769.