Broken Partnership: The Impact of Increased Education Debt

The high level of borrowing to pay the cost of higher education is a grave concern. This article is divided into four sections. The first will review the past and examine today's baseline. The second part examines college cost and aid trends. The third part explores the implications for the future if college students continue to borrow in greater and greater amounts, and partners continue to step back from their commitments to financing higher education. The fourth part of the article offers a proposal to create a new generation of loan forgiveness programs through a public-private partnership-as one solution to help repair the broken partnership in higher education funding. The involvement of business as a partner with the government to offer student loan repayment assistance as an employee benefit is only one solution to a serious issue. It is the hope of the author that readers approach this proposal with an open mind, and use it as a prompt for developing new solutions to the problem of growing student loan debt.