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Comment by kardashev | Hacker News Reader

Though I can't recommend it, there would actually be better outcomes if we banned loans for college. Flooding the higher education market with cash has made it less affordable not more. Having people be responsible for the cost up front would make them better shoppers and the colleges more lean. Prices would come back down to reasonable levels.

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No, the government just needs to stop subsidizing loans. The price of tuition has reason in step with the availability of loans---Colleges and Universities are simply charging the maximum amount they can get away with. The federal government has created an artificial externality in higher education.

Loans are the only way that some students can compete with the other students who get to go to school for free or at a discount. Maybe free money should be banned, or distributed more "intelligently" even if that means spreading it uniformly over everyone who gets accepted.

And when students graduate with loans, they have to pay for themselves as well as the other students who got free money (via taxes).

The downside, of course, is that people who are from poor families never get to attend college. This perpetuates poverty in certain families/neighborhoods/regions and discourages diversity of opinion in universities and the workplace.

Actually (counter-intuitively) college would be more affordable for middle class and the poor in a situation where there are no loans. Consider, there are only a tiny amount of rich people and there are many, many colleges. If there were no loans, colleges would have to make themselves affordable enough to get any enrollment. A large portion of tuition increases have come from bloated administration and useless degree programs. Those would disappear if people weren't given gobs of money in loans.

Sure the price will come way down, but it will still be out of reach for the people who are most likely to perpetuate poverty in their families. Surely the price would not drop below the annual difference in median incomes between those with and without degrees. If I'm going to make an extra $5k a year just for having the degree, I can get my family to cover it. Poor people can't really afford that. In fact, I'd wager there is no price at which it is viable to run a university that doesn't make it unattainable for people with parents living paycheck-to-paycheck.

If colleges are worried about diversity they can do financial aid. Many elite schools do that.

But we aren't doing poor kids any favor putting them tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt for college.

Also, we have community colleges and public colleges. Tuition in my state for community college and a public school is under 30k for a full degree if you mix community and public 4 year. Motivated students could do part time school over 6-7 years while working full time.

The situation is identical to health care. Decades of propaganda that you will pay anything for a 4-yr degree or health care. Pay anything, eh? How much you got? Oh you have $100K of loans, I guess it'll cost $100K then.

This is the pointlessness of the article. Like asking what percentage of heart attack victims know how much their bill will add up to. Oh you say without that treatment I'll die, well then I guess I like that treatment. How much does it cost, well, lets start with how much do you have?

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