The debate over the Biden administration’s college loan relief plan has obscured a broader and more important issue: Why has college education become so expensive to begin with? It’s a complicated question that has many answers, but it’s one that anyone interested in real college-debt reform should be asking.

Biden’s plan to forgive between $10,000 and $20,000 per student in federally backed college loan debt is currently stalled in court — and isn’t doing so well in the court of public opinion. Polling shows support for the plan predictably split along partisan lines, but with low support from independents. Overall, a plurality of Americans support it, but not a majority.

As we have noted before, there are reasons for even liberals and progressives to have reservations about this plan: Its $125,000 income ceiling loops in a lot of people who don’t need relief. Offering relief to current debt-holders is unfair to those who have already paid off their debts, or who will acquire them in the future. And it’s inflationary to effectively pump hundreds of billions of federal dollars into the economy.

But the biggest problem with Biden’s plan is that it fails to address the underlying causes of skyrocketing tuition, which is ultimately the cause of the debt crisis. The net cost of a four-year degree — after applying financial aid and other price breaks — is twice what it was 20 years ago. Only hospital care has risen at a faster rate.

No wonder average student loan debt has ballooned from about $17,000 per graduate in 2000 to almost $40,000 now. Total outstanding debt today tops $1.7 trillion.

Experts point to a range of reasons for out-of-control tuition: There is the explosion of high-cost student amenities (state-of-the-art recreational facilities and the like) that have become major selling points as universities compete for students. There are bloated administrative costs, which have risen even as spending on professors and instructors has dropped. And perhaps most disturbingly, there’s the abdication by state governments of their funding responsibilities for higher education, forcing universities to push more of the cost onto students.

Data from the National Science Foundation shows that state spending per student has remained flat or even dropped (when adjusted for inflation) over the past 20 years, even as education has become more expensive. Missouri, for example, spent on average about $6,200 per student in university funding in 2020, compared to almost $8,000 (inflation adjusted) in 2000.

The student-loan debt crisis is ultimately better understood as a tuition-hike crisis — one that could threaten to return society to the days when higher education was solely the purview of the wealthy. Debt is the symptom. Trying to alleviate it without addressing the root causes of the disease isn’t the answer.

— St. Louis Post-Dispatch