Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has perfected the Twitter takedown, and she just came for Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.
DeVos led an online meeting of the Federal Student Aid office, and many hoped this would address President Trump’s possible extension of the administration’s pause of student loan payments. In August, Trump extended his student debt relief plan through the end of the year, but there’s been no word on whether the government would force students and graduates to begin paying back their loans come 2021. Unfortunately, instead of addressing this very real and pressing concern, DeVos spent most of the conference theorizing on President-elect Joe Biden’s ideas on how to forgive millions of their student debt and make higher education free for those who qualify.
DeVos, a conservative billionaire philanthropist, has gotten plenty of flack for her efforts to roll back Title IX protections in schools and to steer funding away from public education. During her speech, she attacked Biden’s support for plans to forgive up to $10,000 in federal aid for borrowers and to push colleges and universities to make tuition free for families who earn less than $125,000 per year.
“We’ve heard shrill calls to cancel, to forgive, to make it all free,” DeVos said. “Any innocuous label out there can’t obfuscate what it really is: wrong. The campaign for free college is a matter of total government control. Make no mistake: It is a socialist takeover of higher education. Now, depending on your personal politics, some of you might not find that notion as scary as I do. But mark my words: None of you will like the way it will work.”
DeVos went on to paint a grim picture of what higher education might look like if it was free and available to all, one that included references to DMV wait times and invoked the failings of K-12 public schools. Of course, considering we currently operate under a free market system when it comes to secondary education, one that often leaves children in need behind, some people just aren’t buying that. And by some people, we mean Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who sharpened her knives and skewered DeVos on social media over her comments.
Tuition-free public college is a dangerous socialist takeover of higher ed, as opposed to the far superior capitalist takeover of higher ed, which reliably buries millions of Americans in trillions of dollars in debt & graduates them into low paying jobs without good healthcare👍🏽 https://t.co/dcu6PIRKcC
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) December 1, 2020
And that’s how you get schooled on Twitter. Better luck next time, Betsy.