And let the light debate begin.

Welcome to Mass Ave, conservative insight from the Heritage Foundation's Freedom Center,

just steps from Capitol Hill with Emily Vanderbush and Brad Bishop.

And welcome to Mass Ave. We are talking about student loans. It's springtime, it's May.

College graduates are coming out, and they're probably looking at steeper student loans than most before them.

So here to talk about it is Murray-Clairene.

She is our education expert here at the Heritage Foundation and focuses specifically on higher education.

So thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me.

So I guess just to start out, why is college so expensive? Yeah, this is a question that we've

been asking ourselves for decades. So back in 1987, the then Secretary of Education Bill Bennett

first wrote an op-ed in the New York Times where he said, you know, I'm starting to think that

this unfettered

access to federal student loans that we have now might be encouraging colleges and universities

to raise their tuition prices. And back then, colleges and universities were raising their

prices a little bit, nothing like we see today. Since then, the problem has only gotten worse,

and we have more research from economists than ever suggesting that because

we have, you know, this blank check from the federal government virtually to students to finance their

higher education, universities have been able to get away with tuition increases because they're not

losing students because of that. And this sort of makes sense. If you go to the store and you buy

something and you know someone else is paying for it, you're not necessarily looking for the best deal.

And if there's no cap on one, someone else can take, then whoever's producing that product is going

to try and charge the most that they can. So that's what we've seen. And so we need to get the

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