Snapshot · Planet Money
Education Secretary William Bennett published his 'Our Greedy Colleges' op-ed in the New York Times on February 18, 1987, launching the hypothesis that federal aid enables tuition hikes.
Where this was said
At 9:01 · chapter starts 7:10
The conversation shifts to a fundamental question that the episode will wrestle with throughout: is student debt the cause of the crisis, or the symptom? Kenny Malone asks pointedly whether the problem is loan availability or the underlying cost of college itself [1] — Kenny Malone "Is the problem that the money is being given out or that the money is needed, that college is so expensive?" 05:03 . Cory Turner's answer is revealing — undergraduate net tuition has barely changed in about 10 years. The scary numbers that parents see in college savings calculators are based on rising sticker prices, not what families actually pay after financial aid. The real runaway cost story, Turner says, is in graduate school, where net tuition has genuinely ballooned — and that's exactly where the new caps are targeted.
On February 18, 1987, Education Secretary William Bennett published 'Our Greedy Colleges' in the New York Times. He argued that federal student aid gives colleges a blank check to raise prices. Economists named the idea the Bennett Hypothesis — and it became the intellectual foundation for today's loan cap policy.
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