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Honestly, screw the modern "higher education" system. It's a business, pure and simple, designed to milk out every penny from kids and their parents, as much as humanly possible while still being "legal". It wasn't always so unbalanced, but that's the way it is today, and that's a crying shame.

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Many would say that it's actually designed to milk the pennies from the federal government by proxy of the student and parent with a significant markup.

This is somewhat worse than simply taking from individuals because it implies a systemic breakage that someone is taking advantage of, possibly using political influence to keep that breakage from being fixed.

This. Although I am a believer in and a onetime recipient of federal student aid, there's no denying that there exists an educational-financial-industrial complex which needs to churn through new student borrowers as the substrate for keeping uncle sam's cash flowing. Very similar to the Medicare and 401k industries in a way, given their ostensible social goals, the massive government supplied sums involved, and the need to attach these sums to individual names and lives.

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