It's a factor, but I disagree that it's the root cause. That distinction goes to the quiet destruction of aid by Ronald Reagan. The rapid shift towards loan-based support is directly linked to Reagan's targeted policies--and that shift led to a well-documented explosion in tuition costs.
And Reagan's legacy didn't just affect higher ed--it put public K-12 on the path to the financial and 'common core' shitshow that it is today.
I'm honestly baffled by the downvotes. Do readers not know that what I described is what led to what the article claims as the cause? To simplify: it wasn't who guaranteed the loans that was the problem, it was the expansion of loans and their general replacement of grants that led to cost inflation and the resulting crippling debt.
Here's just one of hundreds of explanations of how Reagan fucked higher ed. It's not a theory--it's a very basic and well-documented fact.
From that article:
"The shift began in the 1980s, in terms of a changing political philosophy. President Ronald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, said in 1981, “If people want to go to college bad enough, then there is opportunity and responsibility on their part to finance their way through the best way they can.” When those who argued that college is a private benefit framed it like that, it became logical to say that education should be paid for by the people that it benefits. And so in the 1990s, the vast expansion of loans for higher education began."
And you can track--with plentiful data--the rise of college costs in direct parallel to this shift, year over year.
And Reagan's legacy didn't just affect higher ed--it put public K-12 on the path to the financial and 'common core' shitshow that it is today.