This week the president announced that, having fallen throughout the 1990s, the rate was now 6.9 percent, the lowest on record. The reclamation of the program is a huge accomplishment, bipartisan, bicameral.
Officials attribute the achievement in part to the continuing strength of the economy.
People with better jobs are better able to repay. But the decline in the rate is a function of policy as well, the tightening-up of a program that had become a sieve. Reagan administration officials were among the first to sound the alarm in the 1980s. They took a pounding early on as anti-education, but they were right. The worst of them induced students to take out loans they had no prospect of repaying, to pay for courses that had little prospect of resulting in employment.