DeSantis says colleges should pay the price when students default on loans

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said Thursday that colleges and universities should bear the burden when a student defaults on his or her student loan debt.

At a campaign event in South Carolina, DeSantis said that colleges should be accountable when a student defaults on his or her student loans, the university should be on the hook for paying back that debt. DeSantis also touted the fact that Florida does not allow state universities to raise their tuition.

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”Incidentally in Florida, we don’t let our universities raise tuition,” DeSantis said. “So it’s about $6,400 in-state for tuition at the University of Florida, Florida State, and all those places, and we’re holding the line on that. Our view is you guys deliver an education that is affordable, I don’t want anyone to have to be deep in debt just to get a college degree.”

”And one of the things we need to do to make sure that there’s more emphasis on practical education, not just support workforce programs, but at the universities, they should be responsible for defaulted student loan debt,” he continued. “If you produce somebody that can’t pay it back, that’s on you.” 

Gov. @RonDeSantis: “At the universities, they should be responsible for defaulted student loan debt. If you produce somebody that can’t pay it back, that’s on you.”

”I don’t want ANYONE to have to be deep in debt just to get a college degree!” pic.twitter.com/4wMhI7xLn7

— Never Back Down (@NvrBackDown24) June 22, 2023

DeSantis made similar comments at an event in Iowa in May. “If somebody defaults, the university should pick it up,” he said at the time. “If they were on the hook for it, they would make sure the curriculum was designed to produce people that can be very productive. You’d have a heck of a lot less gender studies going on.”

DeSantis’s comments come after the Ohio state House of Representatives passed a bill to force colleges to be more transparent about the full cost of a college education. The bill requires colleges to give students a one-page form outlining the total cost of a degree, including tuition and fees, the cost of room and board, grants and scholarships, federal student loans, and work-study requirements.

The document must then include a graduate’s expected monthly cost to repay his or her student loans. It would also require institutions to share data on career outcomes after graduation. This would include “income range between the twenty-fifth and seventy-fifth percentiles” of the most recent graduating class, and the class that graduated five years prior. For students who have declared a major or enrolled in a particular school of a college or university, this would include “income ranges for graduates who had that major or were enrolled in that school.” 

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Republican Senators introduced similar legislation to increase transparency and lower the cost of a college degree. The bill does much of the same things as the Ohio bill at a federal level; it also cuts down the number of student loan repayment plan, and eliminates Graduate PLUS loans, which have no borrowing limit and lower borrowing limits.