From Camile Paglia’s interview with Spectator USA:
I have been trying for decades to get my fellow Democrats to realize how unchecked bureaucracy, in government or academe, is inherently authoritarian and illiberal. A persistent characteristic of civilizations in decline throughout history has been their self-strangling by slow, swollen, and stupid bureaucracies. The current atrocity of crippling student debt in the US (see chart above) is a direct product of an unholy alliance between college administrations and federal bureaucrats — a scandal that ballooned over two decades with barely a word of protest from our putative academic leftists, lost in their post-structuralist fantasies. Political correctness was not created by administrators, but it is ever-expanding campus bureaucracies that have constructed and currently enforce the oppressively rule-ridden regime of college life.
From Economist Mark J. Perry:
The chart above shows graphically the explosion in the growth of “atrocity of crippling student loan debt,” which has increased in percentage terms by 225% between 2006 and 2018, three times more than overall consumer debt increased over that period (63.5%), and 1.4 times more than the increased in total federal government debt (157%). In dollar terms, the current volume of outstanding student loan debt is more than $1.56 trillion, which is burdening the average borrower (44.4 million total) with more than $35,000 in student loan debt. In 2015, nearly seven in 10 college seniors (68%) who graduated from public and non-profit colleges had student loan debt. See lots more student loan debt statistics here.
Via AEI