Interesting that we never see people questioning the cost of that education. Along with that, when the government is supplying the money, the prices go up by leaps and bounds. If the government stopped supplying the money, you would see the cost of education go way down.
I advocate a tax credit for businesses which offer merit scholarships for fields they need and intend to hire. That way, the colleges turn out useful vocations instead of Marxist activists, industry gets the trained professionals they need to compete, and the student has no loan - it was a scholarship.
Much of the reason for the recent Obama-depression explosion in student loan debt and artificially low unemployment are the number of people hiding from the Great Depression 2 in college and paying for it via student loans.
They aren’t arbitrarily high or low. They are just arbitrary. 100% politics, 0% economics.
The subsidized loans affect only 7.2 million who have a student loan subsidized by the government. http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/10/21/the-murky-world-of-student-loan-statistics/ provides information that pretty much supports the contention that nobody knows anything about nothin’ when it comes to the student loan industry! They can’t even tell you how many millions ~ is it 30 or 40 or more ~ that have a student loan!