How Colleges Worsen the Student Debt Crisis; The Economist's Adam O’Neal on Why No One Trusts the Media

Pod and Man at Yale

Aron Ravin ’24 and Anshul Guha ’25 discuss President Biden’s blocked student loan forgiveness program, how colleges benefit from and exacerbate the student debt problem, and why universities like Yale can charge so much.

• Ravin: “That’s exactly why the idea that the federal government needs to step in because college is getting too expensive is an oxymoron; because the federal government is the reason why college has become so expensive.”
• Guha: “The intentions matter and the government had good intentions, at least, of trying to get more people to college, whereas universities really did not have those noble intentions in mind.”
• Ravin: “I’m not even just saying it’s unfair for the people who didn’t go to college to have to subsidize people who did go to college to become wealthier than they are. But it’s even more unfair to the people who went to college and actually paid off their debt.”
• Guha: “I’m really afraid that we won’t learn from our mistakes. And we won’t learn how to be fiscally conservative. And that we’ll just find ourselves in a different debt bubble of some other kind in the future.”

Pod and Man at Yale was joined by The Economist Washington Correspondent Adam O’Neal who was serving as Executive Editor at The Dispatch at the time of the interview. O’Neal talked about why so many Americans distrust the media and shared insider insights on how to get an op-ed published. O’Neal had spoken with Buckley Fellows as part of the Buckley Institute’s Lux et Veritas Leadership Program.

• O’Neal: “Most journalists that I’ve met in, let’s say, the ‘legacy media’ or the ‘mainstream media,’ they’re not necessarily activists but they just come from that milieu where they all sort of think the same way.”
• O’Neal: “I don’t Tweet… I’d much rather let the work itself speak for me than some Tweets, which may or may not reflect what I’m actually thinking a week later.”
• O’Neal: “There’s no conservative who you guys are gonna bring in or person on the right who hasn’t been touched by [William F.] Buckley in some way.”

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