An intolerable intolerance: informed editorial about Virginia Foxx's latest utterances/student loans [View all]

[Mira]

An intolerable intolerance
by Ken Ilgunas


(my comment: this visual is my favorite about my Congress Critter Virginia Foxx, it lives in my archives and needs to be aired every now and then)

Ken Ilgunas is a writer who lives in Stokes County, NC. He is writing a book on student debt that will be published in May 2013.

Last week, Rep. Virginia Foxx offered the nation's 36 million student debtors a lesson in tolerance.
She told radio show host G. Gordon Liddy that she has "very little tolerance" for student debtors who have as much as $80,000 or $200,000 in student loans.
"There's no reason for that," Foxx said.
Actually, there are a lot of reasons why student debtors have over $1 trillion in debt. And Foxx is one of them.
But before I get to that, it bears mentioning how the cost of education has gone up since Foxx got her B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1968.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 1968 tuition, room and board cost an average of $1,169 for an in-state student enrolled at a four-year university (or the equivalent of $7,705 today, adjusting for inflation). In 2012, a student pays $17,131 a year, according to the College Board.
"I worked my way through [college]," said Foxx. "I never borrowed a dime of money."
While Foxx's thrift and hard work are to be admired, bragging about avoiding student debt in the '60s is like bragging about having avoided some disease decades before an epidemic started. (When Foxx was enrolled at Chapel Hill, the tuition was $87.50 a semester.)
Older generations reminding younger generations about how much harder they had it seems to be a predictable pattern of human nature. And though there may sometimes be truth to such claims, Foxx's generation — due in large part to the Higher Education Act of 1965, which made college affordable to students from low-income families — had it far easier than today's students, at least when it comes to affording college.
To further illustrate my point, consider how much it would cost to work your way through college in 1968. In Foxx's day, to pay for tuition, room and board, a student at a public university needed to work 14 hours a week at a minimum-wage job, year-round. Today, however, a student would have to manage working 46 hours a week, year-round.
Foxx's "very little tolerance" attitude would be permissible if she was just an ill-informed, out-of-touch anybody, with no responsibility for the educations of young people today. But because she is the chairwoman of the House Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Training and is responsible for students' welfare, there is something particularly disturbing about her statement — disturbing because she has opposed legislation that was crafted to make college more affordable for students.
Foxx voted against the 2007 College Cost Reduction and Access Act that increased the Pell Grant award to low-income students and reduced interest rates on federal loans. She also voted against the 2008 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act — the very act that made education affordable for her generation.
Foxx has not only tried to obstruct the passage of helpful legislation, she has supported an industry that profits when students go into debt.

Source, and the rest of the editorial, every sentence is important:

http://www2.journalnow.com/news/opinion/2012/apr/24/wsopin02-ken-ilgunas-guest-columnist-an-intolerabl-ar-2197903/