Outgoing Education Secretary Betsy DeVos presented a spirited defense of her record after four years and skewered proposals from progressive politicians related to student debt cancellation and free college at the virtual 2020 Federal Student Aid (FSA) Training Conference on Tuesday.
“After nearly four years on the job, I want to take a few moments to reflect on the remarkable transformations that we led at FSA in recent years,” DeVos said at the beginning of the keynote speech, “and then discuss what still needs to be done for students.”
Read more: How to repay student loans: The full breakdown
‘A socialist takeover of higher education’
DeVos took aim at proposals to cancel student debt, a proposal that the incoming Biden administration campaigned on, calling debt forgiveness “the truly insidious notion of government gift giving.”
“We’ve heard shrill calls to ‘cancel,’ to ‘forgive,’ to ‘make it all free,’” Devos added. “Any innocuous label out there can’t obfuscate what it really is: wrong.”
She also condemned the Democrat-supported idea of providing free college to lower-income Americans, calling the proposal “a socialist takeover of higher education.”
“Now, depending on your personal politics, some of you might not find that notion as scary as I do,” DeVos said. “But mark my words: None of you would like the way it will work.”
The way the government has handled student loans was a case in point, she argued.
“The first step was monopolizing student lending,” DeVos said. “$1.5 trillion later, can anyone say with a straight face that students are better off? That taxpayers are better off?”
Making college free would water down the quality of American higher ed, DeVos claimed, adding: “If the politicians proposing ‘free college’ today get their way, just watch our colleges and universities begin to resemble a failing K-12 school, with the customer service of the DMV to boot.”
DeVos also asserted that it would be “fundamentally unfair to ask two-thirds of Americans who don’t go to college to pay the bills for the mere one-third who do. And it’s even more unfair to those who have held up their end of the bargain and paid back their student loans themselves to subsidize those who don’t save, plan, and pay.”
Instead, she proposed making FSA, which holds the trillion-dollar loan portfolio, a standalone government agency with its own Board of Governors.
“Today, FSA has more than $1.5 trillion in outstanding loans on the books,” DeVos noted. “Too many of those loans are either delinquent, in default, or are loans on which borrowers are paying so little [that] their loan balance continues to grow.”