Editorial: How to lower costs in higher education

Las Vegas Review-Journal, Las Vegas Review-Journal on Oct 27, 2026

Published in Op Eds

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The soaring cost of higher education has been a problem for decades. Congressional Republicans have shown how to fix it.

Last year, President Donald Trump signed his One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Because it contained so much — tax cuts, ICE funding and a new school choice program — it’s easy to overlook how it reformed the student loan program. Prior to the legislation, the federal government essentially provided unlimited loans for graduate students through Grad PLUS loans, a program that began in 2006.

That may sound compassionate. It meant graduate students never had to turn down their dream school for financial considerations. And, this line of thinking went, the loans made financial sense because a graduate degree would increase lifetime earnings.

Not surprisingly, the number of students earning master’s degrees has increased over the past 20 years. In the 2005-06 school year, universities awarded around 600,000 master’s degrees. In 2020-21, it was more than 850,000.

It shouldn’t take an advanced degree to figure out what happened next. Universities responded with more aggressive tuition hikes. A 2023 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research noted that “our results demonstrate that schools do in fact respond to increased loan access by increasing tuition.”

This hasn’t worked out well for students. In 2018, the Government Accountability Office found that the median borrower with Grad PLUS loans “had taken out over $140,000 in federal student loans.” Little wonder that so many college graduates are desperate for the federal government to wipe away their obligations. Meanwhile, the nation’s aggregate student loan debt sits at $1.9 trillion and counting.

The best plan would be to get the government out of the student loan business. That’s unlikely. But reforms in the recent bill did cap loan amounts. This year, students can borrow only $20,500 for most graduate programs. For some professional programs, such as medicine and law, the amount is $50,000.

Lo and behold, the American Enterprise Institute recently found more than 40 graduate schools have lowered costs since that bill passed. That includes discounts at Northern Arizona University and New Mexico State University. The University of California, Irvine, is cutting the cost of its Executive MBA by $48,000 to ensure tuition is “below the federal loan cap for graduate business degrees.” Santa Clara University will give full-time law students a guaranteed $16,000 annual scholarship.

Congressional leaders should build on these results by lowering caps on student loans for undergraduate and graduate programs. Turning off the federal money spigot — and letting the private sector pick up the slack — is the key to reducing prices.

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