The real part of this isn’t the parent caps, it’s the revocation of the public service loan forgiveness. There are tens of thousands of people (at least) who have already graduated and are relying on that deal. DeVos wants to yank it away (which serves double duty: a) screwing poor people, b) making sure that jobs that help other poor people don’t get done).
There’s also the 15-years-and-out part, which will either not happen (even though you would think it would be inextricably connected to the public-service provision) or else will become a fraud magnet, where well-off people take maximal loans, make minimal payments, and then get their outstanding balance forgiven at taxpayer expense.
If these brilliant minds had actually learned something from their expensive educations they would know that you have to define a problem correctly before you can hope to actually solve it. Tight wing ideologues never have that problem, because they already possess perfect truth.
Of course, it is remarkable how knowing “perfect truth” always ends up in defining all problems in terms of what creates maximum advantages for themselves at the expense of anyone else.
The reason for rising tuition is rising costs, and for public colleges a loss of revenue from state support. Costs are rising because students have expectations of the facilities that a college will provide, and any college that does not provide those facilities is out of business. Administrative costs are rising because of all kinds of federal compliance that a university has to monitor (FERPA, Title IX, IRB, grantsmanship, the list goes on and on).
Doing nothing about the costs, while withdrawing revenue, puts colleges (those that don’t have huge endowments to bail them out) in a bind where they will no longer be able to offer competitive salaries to world-class researchers. So those people will go off to Google and work on products instead of basic research.
The Trump administration won’t mind that at all. The first Muslim ban was stopped by an injunction brought by universities, afraid of losing the foreign graduate students that keep the lights on.
Meanwhile, China is starting to eat the US’s lunch e.g. in AI and Machine Learning research, with citation indexes showing Chinese publications competing with US, something that would have been unthinkable ten years ago.
This is what happens when a country, even one as big and rich as the US, devolves into a banana republic. Eventually the Google’s and the Amazons of the world offshore, because they can’t get enough good graduates because the university system is failing.
