Dave Ramsey is not holding back when it comes to the student loan crisis and what he sees as the universities’ role in it. In a recent episode of “The Ramsey Show,” the personal finance expert and radio host ripped into the state of higher education in America and how inflated college costs are putting millions of students into life-altering debt.
Colleges Are Building Lazy Rivers While Students Drown In Debt
“We spent a lot of time delving into the student loan epic failure that is in America today,” Ramsey said, referring to his free YouTube documentary “Borrowed Future.” He pointed out that student loan debt has ballooned to $1.8 trillion, blaming multiple parties, including Congress for creating and failing to shut down the program.
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But Ramsey saved some of his harshest criticism for higher education institutions themselves.
“You can blame that on higher education because they’ve run the cost up through the roof,” he said. “The inflation rate of higher education is about 3x the normal inflation rate.” He was direct about what those tuition hikes are funding: “They’re building lazy rivers for college freshmen; they really are. A couple of campuses have this now. They can ride an inner tube through the lazy river under the dorm. It’s unfreaking believable.”
Ramsey also said parents are part of the problem, calling many of them “enabling wusses” for signing off on Parent PLUS loans they know their kids can't repay. “No is a complete sentence,” he said. “If your child comes in and says, ‘I want to go to a school we cannot afford,’ and you say, ‘I don’t think you should,’ you don’t go take out a parent plus loan and pay for it with your signature.”
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Co-host and Ramsey’s daughter Rachel Cruze chimed in, saying the real issue isn’t just student loans—it’s bad parenting. “For parents to just sit back is negligence to me. Step into your kids’ lives and talk to them about the repercussions of this.”
Cruze also called out the normalization of debt. “It's kind of like, well, it's so expensive no one can afford it, so just go wherever you want to go. That's the message out there.”
Ramsey shared a personal story about one of his own children wanting to attend Auburn University instead of the University of Tennessee, which charged triple the tuition. “So you’re going to pay double because you want to go across the state line 50 miles for basically the same degree? The discussion was—no. Or you got to figure out a way to pay for it.”
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The solution, they both argue, is to choose an affordable, practical path—community college, in-state schools, and degrees that actually offer a return on investment.
“You can’t keep an 18-year-old from leaving home and going $150,000 in student loan debt,” Ramsey said. “But you can say, ‘I’m not giving you any emotional or financial support for your stupidity because I love you and I’m not going to endorse you bringing harm to yourself.'”
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