Doing something like making community college and trade school level degrees free and leaving everything else to private loans sorta makes sense. (Arguably 80% of university graduates really didn’t need their degree for their job.)
Banks will lend less, to people they think will pay it back. Which means schools will have to charge less, particularly for non-profitable majors.
What is does mean, however, is that no sane entity will then continue giving out loans for someone to go $75k in debt to go to cooking school.
How I’ve no idea. Right now it’s kinda risk free to give loans out so that would change. Maybe then less cash is made available and universities have extra capacity.
I think this would be a vastly better scenario simply because all interests would be aligned. Universities would have an incentive to keep prices reasonable because lenders would want to keep the total amount lent per individual relatively low. Universities would also have an incentive to ensure students would be likely to be able to comfortably provide for themselves after graduation because, once again, lenders would have an incentive to ensure that the people they're lending to will be able to comfortably pay back their loan once they graduate. And so forth and so on. In the end, we'd likely reach a scenario where it'd be relatively easy to obtain loans for majors likely to improve your ability to comfortably provide for yourself, and relatively difficult to obtain loans for majors likely to leave you with difficulties providing for yourself.
A world where anyone could pursue education, on public dollar, on any topic they'd like, is an interesting idea. I look forward to seeing the outcomes now that such systems are truly starting to be put to the test. Many nations are facing substantial pressures on their social systems such as aging populations, increasing costs of medical care, reduced fertility rates, immigration of lower earning individuals, etc. At the same time, the face of the job market is constantly changing such that an ever larger share of all desirable careers require some degree of educational specialization to even get your foot in the door. These are relatively new problems and I'm not entirely convinced that utopic ideas of decades past will remain viable in the decades to come - though I certainly hope to be proven wrong!
But if it became commonly done after graduating, then I imagine it would not predict much about whether you will pay the mortgage on your house (which is anyway secured by the house) and so lenders would soon not care.
The upside is that lenders would still have to consider whether the borrower is actually likely to be able to pay back their loan
There's undoubtedly tons of waste in universities' functioning, but I don't blame policymakers for treading lightly when it comes to constraining their operations in any significant way for fear of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, as opposed to simply the baseline ideological skew towards less direct regulation of businesses.
Innovate in trade schools and start convincing high school students to take that path instead of University.
that's a tax on the non-attendees, why should they pay for your education when it significantly raises your earning potential?
The real difference is government funding for universities. No country in the world has made higher education affordable to the masses without high levels of government funding -- the US used to do this and stopped, with predictable results.
Did he mean complicated process for the school to buy them, or was he making them and selling them to the school himself?
Also, theft when you are an adult is not excused by claiming you were dumb kids in my opinion.
I appreciate both sides of this and I'm not sure where I currently am on the issue.
Libraries do purge from their shelves, and probably should as time progresses. It is interesting to me the figuring on what to purge, for obvious reasons. Likewise for what new material "should" be taken in to [re]fill the shelves.
Similarly, I once purchased a ~50-year-old book about "future" rocket science from a used book store. The clerk actually asked for clarification, "You understand this book is 50 years old, right?" ... yes I do, please take my money. This makes me wonder where libraries dispose of their discarded stock if not some gigantic shredder or similar.
I agree, but you can hardly force low-performing students to quit and pursue apprenticeship instead?
That's ... actually how it's done, yes. Besides dam construction the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maschsee is a nice example of literal hole digging.