I got an idea....if we have such an out of control student load debt problem, how about getting goobermint out of stuff that’s none of their business and let banks loan on the basis of creditworthiness and the projected monetary value of the degree? Then maybe people wouldn’t be living in Mom’s basement with $150K in student loans and a degree in left handed basked weaving that took them six years to get. (because they’d be forced into pursuing a worthwhile major or not get the money)
I think the schools should take the risk for at least 1/2 of the loan and come up with 1/2 of the loan amount. All repayments should be split equally between the school and the other lender. You will see the school invested in the ability of the student to repay.
“how about getting goobermint out of stuff that’s none of their business and let banks loan on the basis of creditworthiness and the projected monetary value of the degree? “
When Congress looked into the loans what they probably found was well qualified students were getting loans and students who had insufficient background to get into college were not. Then, they discovered that the majority of qualified applicants were white or Asian and that the majority of unqualified applicants were black. They then set about making sure that the process was not only fair as to who got the loan but also racially fair. (I think the presumption was that some (many?) blacks were actually qualified but not getting the loans because they were black.) They set up a quota and in order to fill the quota of blacks they had to lower the standards. This allowed unqualified whites and unqualified Asians to also get loans.
Students who have a hard time making the grade in STEM courses gravitated to “Studies” programs which had no hard grades because all opinions count therefor how do you grade somebody down?
Once you take a system that is optimized for one thing, getting loans to qualified applicants, and try to tweak it for political purposes, the entire system collapses. We are dealing with that collapse. It’s the same as Fanny and Freddie Mac loans going to people who would never be able to pay them back. The student loan crisis could be just as bad as the housing bubble.