In the US people can’t clear student loans in bankruptcy. It’s a shame, I think, given the constant upward tick in tuition and lack of resulting careers. They can even go after the students parents.
The student loan problem is a result of the generalized "prestige economy" that's driving the problems with journals (and whose failures include that cascade of replication crises). To see this, realize that the only reason so many people are going to university at all is because a good name on your resume is now a requirement for getting any reasonably well-paying job. See the parallels between that and how academics need good names on their CVs in order to compete? It's a prisoner's dillema where the cooperation-case would be that every person who doesn't need their degree for their career would drop out at the same time that every academic switched to open-access journals.
I hadn't heard of pay-to-read journals being an attempt to create a "market-free zone".
Don't forget the swelling of superfluous administration roles and salaries, including bureaucratic roles whose entire job entails manufacturing problems to justify the existence of their position. See: campus diversity officers https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/09/americ...
Mind you, this requirement was in addition to all the existing courses you had to take (40 for a BA degree).
Consequently, for most, choosing where and what they are going to study would either be a research project in and of itself, or else they'd just pick one of the few specialties known to pay well. And we didn't even pay for college!
* requirement for high down payment - perhaps 50 to 75% of the tuition being covered by student or his parents (through home equity loans or retirement account loans)
* frequent and aggressive repayment schedule, starting perhaps 30 days after originating the loan
* high interest rate, perhaps front-loaded into repayment schedule due to higher than normal default rates
* aggressive monitoring of the events related to debt performance, where missed class, late homework, substandard grade or a behavioral citation could result in interest rate boost
* incentives and price control mechanisms enforced by the lender - your computer science class will have a low interest rate, but that music appreciation class or gender studies gotta be out-of-pocket
I think overall that would lower the enrollment rate and force the unbundling of academic offerings. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I can see some people being against it.
Maybe you could explain this to me, because I really don't understand. Why do you think that it's a shame that people can't just discharge substantial, otherwise unsecured government loans?
To me, the real shame is high school employees pushing college on marginal students. One of the few things worse than spending too much money on a not-particularly lucrative degree is spending the money, but not graduating.
I believe the graduation rate at Bellevue College, the biggest and best community college* in WA state is around 25%. I'm sure they're not unusual in that regard.
* It's technically not a community college, but for all intents and purposes, it is.
Many of my friends who went there have horror stories about their teachers which I'd be hard pressed to encounter at Seattle Central College or North Seattle College.
Nearly every community college in the Puget Sound decided about a decade ago to shed the community branding and add a handful of 4 year degrees. Problem is the material you learn in upper level CS classes at UW and its satellites is quite different than what North Seattle College and Seattle Central College require (eg: a whole class on SQL Server, C# as the Intro CS class at Seattle Central rathr than the state mandated Python, etc).
41% of all US undergraduate students have nothing material to show 6 years down the road except for the mounts of student debt. The quoted figure of 22% of those debts being in some kind of default starts looking optimistic.
If at first you don't succeed... damn well better be an entrepreneur so you get second chances. If you work for a living, no second chances for you!
Not enough lenders would want to take that risk, unless they have the taxpayer to back them up in case the borrower defaults.
If the borrower's allowed to wipe their debt in bankruptcy, then a lot of students will simply declare bankruptcy as soon as they leave school. The students who play by the rules are burdened with debt, and you're subsidizing people who game the system to their advantage.
The fairest thing to do, then, is either subsidize everybody, and have taxpayer-funded higher education (but that's expensive).
Or subsidize nobody, and let people pay their own way (but that leaves behind students whose families can't afford it).
Or fund the most promising students, and make everybody else pay (but that leaves behind students who don't have good academic record).
Personally I don't like the idea that our society starts its newest members out with a huge debt burden.