Even Billionaire Mark Cuban Thinks President Biden Needs To Lower ‘Ridiculous’ College Fees
If he won't pay them, how can we?
Kathy Hutchins / BiksuTong / Shutterstock.com Entrepreneur and owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, Mark Cuban, is worth an estimated $4.3 billion dollars and made his billions all on his own merit.
Like many youth and young adults, he went to college and studied his butt off to make it in the bustling business world, racking up student loan debts along the way.
Although he was able to pay it all off through his various business ventures before becoming rich, he doesn’t think everyone else should have to go through the same thing.
Mark Cuban wants President Biden to tackle 'ridiculous tuition fees.'
Cuban spoke to Business Insider about his views on the widely debated topic, switching from his previous position to a more progressive approach to the subject.
"How do we keep students from repeating the same mistakes?" he said.
In order to tackle the crippling student loan debt crisis, Cuban argues that there needs to be some sort of regulation against the “ridiculous tuition fees” that colleges and universities are charging their students.
The idea is to cap how much students can take out in loans so that colleges and universities are forced to lower their tuitions or lose millions of dollars in the decrease in enrollments.
"We don't want this being a perennial problem," he said in an email. "It has to be fixed. As far as how much should be forgiven, I'm good with the Biden proposal."
The Mavericks owner has repeatedly brought up the fact that lowering the student debt would bolster the economy — his one view on the matter that has never changed.
“That’s the same money that, when you graduated, you used to move out of the house or you went out and spent money that improved the economy and helped companies grow,” he told CNBC in 2014.
Consumerism has long proven that, under the right circumstances, the economy relies on people spending the money that they make in order to stay afloat.
The more money circulating around the economy, the healthier it stays.
However, if students, recent graduates, withdrawers, or the like are in tens or even hundreds of thousands in student loan debt, no one is going to spend any money.
Cuban once said to Business Insider in 2015 that "the worst thing you can do" is cancel the student loan debt, "All it does is bail out the universities."
But instead of canceling it, he believes that the $10,000 student debt forgiveness that President Joe Biden promised in his campaign is a good start, now he just has to follow through.
The President revealed last Thursday that he’ll “have an answer for that in the next couple of weeks" when he was asked about student debt following a White House speech about aid to Ukraine.
"I am considering dealing with some [student] debt reduction,” he said, as reported by Insider, “I am not considering $50,000 debt reduction but I'm in the process of taking a hard look at whether there will be additional debt forgiveness.”
The $10,000 amount is what he had originally pledged during his campaign trail but has fallen short of delivering since his inauguration as President.
As the midterm elections are starting to heat up and all eyes fall on the President to make some decisive actions in order to win the support of constituents, many hope that the longstanding promise of student loan forgiveness is on the horizon.
Isaac Serna-Diez is a writer who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Follow him on Twitter here.