Fighting over college debt is the wrong fight. We could just make it affordable again

If your social media feed is anything like mine, it’s been filled with memes like these today:

Congrats to everyone who didn’t have college debt. Now you do.

Just to be clear, there is no plan to eliminate student debt. There is a plan to transfer that debt to those that don’t owe it.

No hard-working American without a college degree should have to pay for other students loans period!

That last one particularly rankles because it was posted by former college classmate of mine who went to the same university I did — and we never paid a dime of tuition. We’ll get back to that.

The memestorm started after President Joe Biden took action to address the crippling debt that millions of Americans face from student loans, forgiving up to $20,000 per borrower.

Most posts I’ve seen oppose the action, but not all. For example:

If you have a problem with student loan cancellation because you already paid off your loans, just pretend it’s a tax cut for the rich that you also never got but you mysteriously didn’t complain about

Conservative Christians are fully outraged at student loan forgiveness, missing the irony that their entire professed religion is based on the idea of a canceled debt. Way to lose the plot, kids.

Problem is, both sides have lost the plot.

The argument we’re having is absolutely the wrong one. The real issue is the ridiculous cost of a college education and the bad policy decisions that led us here.

When Bernie Sanders campaigned on tuition-free community college and state university education, most dismissed it as an impossible dream.

It’s not impossible. I know, because we’ve done it before.

And I was a beneficiary of a society that treated higher education pretty much like an extension of the K-12 system.

When I — and my friend who is so outraged over loan cancellation — went to college in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, California state universities didn’t charge tuition.

The cost per semester at our alma mater, Cal State University, Northridge, ranged from about $120 to $150 in miscellaneous fees that mostly supported the student government, the student union and the student health center — which truth be told was mostly a VD clinic.

There were no dorms — a huge part of college expense — and all 28,000 of us CSUN students commuted.

At community college, the fees were so low I don’t even remember what I paid.

For my first two years, I split classes between Glendale Community College and CSUN.

Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I went to Glendale and took my general education classes. Tuesdays and Thursdays, I went to CSUN for classes in my major. The system was seamless. My counselors at Glendale and CSUN coordinated with each other to make sure I was on track to graduate in four years.

I worked summers in a Nevada mine and I graduated with a small bank account, not a debt.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way in Kansas.

The universities are too full of themselves and look down their noses at the community college system, which is seen as a competitor rather than a partner. When my boys were of college age, Wichita State actively discouraged attending community college.

And bizarre state laws prohibit siting a community college in the same county as a university, making concurrent enrollment a long commute.

College can be free, or at least, affordable. The secret, and it’s not too much of one, is to focus the mission on teaching students who show up with a desire to learn — not flashy research and competitive admission policies that get the university higher ratings in the U.S. News and World Report’s college guide.

College was essentially free when I went because my parents’ generation, largely educated on the GI Bill after World War II and Korea, appreciated that an educated and thriving middle class was vital to keeping the U.S.A strong at home and abroad. Our higher ed system was the envy of the world. Now, not so much.

In my 40 years since college, public funding has dropped from nearly 100% of instructional budgets to 34%. The universities made up for it with tuition hikes and disastrously rising levels of student debt.

So here we are, fighting over whether we should forgive that debt.

What we should really be asking is if we should forgive ourselves, for mismanaging a brilliant system we inherited and saddling our children with the debt in the first place.