This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, August 29th, 2019. I'm Caleb Brown.

When Christian Barnard went to college, he did so as cheaply as possible.

Imagine his and my horror at the notion that people who chose big student loans to get through

school, even graduate school, having those loans forgiven at taxpayer expense.

Barnard is now a policy analyst at the Reason Foundation.

We talked about higher ed student debt and debt forgiveness.

How did you get through school cheaply? Well basically basically, when I was in high school, I applied to seven or eight different colleges.

I got accepted to four or five of them.

And then I just started doing some cost analyses, right?

Looking at which ones gave me the biggest financial aid packages,

which ones were actually considering larger merit-based scholarships.

And I ended up choosing a college, Messiah College in Pennsylvania,

that gave me a pretty good, pretty close to full tuition

scholarship and a lot of financial aid. And it was a great school but I ended up selecting that largely because of the

competitive financial aid package. Okay and how did you keep costs down

when you were in college?

So when I was in college, I mean, first of all,

I had a lot of AP credits that I petitioned

for the college to accept.

So I actually was able to start with more than a semester's worth of credits already under my belt.

And then I mean I worked, I did a couple work study jobs, I worked as a janitor. I worked in our career and professional development office. I was a tutor for a lot of philosophy and economic students.

And ultimately I was trying to push to graduate a year early, so I overloaded my credit

...