Rich countries fund higher education as a public investment. The United States decided to stop, handed eighteen-year-olds a loan application instead, and now runs op‑eds wondering why they’re angry. Liz Peek’s Fox News op‑ed, Trump Is Starving the Machine That Creates America’s Socialist Revolutionaries, argues that Trump’s new caps on graduate student loans will starve the “factories producing socialism”—America’s universities—by cutting off the easy money that let students rack up six‑figure debts for degrees that didn’t pay off. The debt made them furious, the fury made them socialists, and the solution is to stop lending them so much. The column is an answer looking for a villain, and it found one in the graduate student.
She has one thing right. Unlimited federal lending made the problem worse. The mechanism is real: when the government says “borrow whatever it costs,” universities charge whatever they want. Reagan’s education secretary warned in 1987 that easy loans would drive up tuition. He was right. Peek is right to cite it. There’s your concession.
Now here’s what she left out.
The loans didn’t create the cost crisis. They filled a hole that someone else blew in university budgets first. Between 1980 and today, the share of public university budgets paid by state appropriations fell from more than three‑quarters to less than half. Tuition rose to make up the difference. Not because universities suddenly got greedy. Because the public partner in the public university walked out of the room, and the bills still had to be paid. The loans were the response, not the cause. They were the thing we handed students when we decided we’d rather not fund the thing collectively anymore.
The sequence matters because the remedy depends on it. Peek wants to cap the loans, which is like fixing a flooded basement by turning off the sump pump while the pipe is still gushing. Graduate students aren’t borrowing six figures because they’re reckless. They’re borrowing six figures because a master’s degree now costs what a house used to, and the state that once paid most of the bill now covers far less. After the Great Recession, state funding for higher education fell sharply and, in most states, never recovered to its pre-recession levels. When you pull public money out of a system and replace it with individual debt, you haven’t made the system cheaper. You’ve just moved the invoice to a nineteen‑year‑old.
And the part about socialism? That’s the tell. The column needs the anger to be ideological because if it’s arithmetic, Peek has to reckon with the arithmetic. A social worker with a master’s degree and $80,000 in debt who can’t afford rent isn’t angry because a professor radicalized her. She’s angry because the math doesn’t close. Calling that “socialism” is a way of not having to look at the math. It relabels a material grievance as a character flaw, which is convenient if your policy preference is to solve the character flaw by cutting off her loans rather than solving the material grievance by restoring public funding.
But the column does something else too. It gestures at the real scale of the theft and then blames the victim for noticing. “They claim they are victims of a rotten system,” Peek writes, “and they are correct.” She concedes the whole thing in one sentence—the system is rotten—and then pivots immediately to blaming the students for falling for “charlatans.” You just admitted the system cheated them. The anger is the appropriate response to being cheated. The only question is what we do about it.
The thing we could do, and used to do, and other countries still do, is fund higher education directly. The GI Bill sent more than two million veterans to college and millions more to trade schools, producing the most educated workforce on earth. The University of California didn’t charge tuition until the 1970s. The City University of New York was free for over a century. Public investment in higher education built the American middle class. Then we stopped.
No other rich country finances higher education the way we do—by making teenagers borrow against their future earnings. Germany abolished tuition entirely. The Nordic countries treat university the way we treat the interstate: boring public infrastructure, paid for by everyone, available to everyone. They’re not socialist countries. They’re capitalist countries that decided, on purpose, that an educated population was worth paying for collectively rather than debt‑financing individually.
We made the opposite choice. We withdrew public funding, replaced it with loans, watched the debt pile up, and then wrote columns blaming the borrowers for being mad about it. The column is a monument to the thing it claims to diagnose. It sees a generation drowning in debt and concludes the problem is that they were allowed to borrow the water.
We could choose differently. Restore state funding to the levels that once made public universities affordable. Expand Pell Grants so undergraduate debt stops compounding before graduate school even starts. Cap tuition at public institutions as a percentage of median income—the way California’s Master Plan did for decades. The money was there before. We decided to move it somewhere else. We can decide to move it back.
We already built the thing once. We tore it up. We can rebuild it.