Make the college free and provide students with a living stipend. Return higher education subsidies (and tax brackets) to their 1950s levels. Join the rest of the developed world.
Many people do not belong in college and learn next to nothing, but go because they're shoo'ed along into it and the universities are in on the joke, and in on the money-making, and undergoing a drastic reduction of standards as a result.
Some data on just how bad higher ed is getting, from 2017: https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/higher-education-erodes-a7c...
Free higher education works well in the European countries that offer it.
What better investment could a society make than allow someone to pursue a field they are passionate about, and letting them start life with a clean slate? I'm by no means a socialist, but I think university should mostly be free.
The only thing (student) debt does is tie someone down. To a lifestyle or employer that they actually should have no loyalty to.
Tax brackets don't need to rise, resources just need to be moved from alternative things (i.e. military spending).
It depends what you're looking at. I think it hurts local communities by exporting all the young talent and gets people plugged into the white collar, global economy.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy what I do, but I think a lot of the time in college could have been better spent learning how to build houses, make furniture, grow food, etc.
If the government is going to pay for it I would like it to be a better resource for enriching the nation, not just a tool for generating more wealth.
Then go do a degree on agro engineering ?
(If performance at an identifiable subset of schools is better, then it's more that spending resources on the other schools is questionable than it is that higher education is in a crisis)
Median salaries pool are much higher at the top yet tuition is really similar across all schools.
This is true with undergraduate programs as well. Median starting salary after graduation at University of Florida is 52k. FIU and UCF, both a few hours away with similar programs? 46k.
University of Houston? 53k. Rice University a few miles away? 64k.
I've named schools that are all pretty good...the story gets much worse with private universities that are not selective. There are always people who do fantastic regardless of which school they go to but in aggregate schools matter a lot.
If you are allowed to re-enroll, you have 1 strike left. Another sub-2.0 GPA and you're gone.
If the US brought such a generation-transforming policy like this to the table, the easiest part of it would be to set that minimum standard across all participating schools. Most likely already have something close to this in place now.
Salaries for adjunct professors teaching the classes cannot get any lower, so the quality of education could remain about the same
The future is in income sharing agreements. Let the market and investors decide if they can be paid back.
Saying that college loans should be dischargeable is basically saying that student loans shouldn't exist (which is a fine point of view, but people should be clear on what their position is).
I like the way this girl did it. Great deal and she was smart about it.
Second point. Saying a loan should be dischargeable does not mean the loan shouldn't exist. It is a cost the lender has to assume. And before you point out that this will be inflicted upon the borrower in the form of higher interest, I have my doubts. The bearer of an additional transactional cost depends on mostly on elasticity, but basically there is so much profit in student loans right now the lenders will just make a lot less money, and nothing else will change.
1) loans should be dischargeable via bankruptcy so that
2) lenders refuse to make such large loans so that
3) tuitions are forced down
Making this change would have an enormous impact on how higher education in the US functions.
> Join the rest of the developed world.
Let me tell you about the situation in Germany with its "free" universities: First of all, there's a three-tier school system with the lowest tier barred from higher education altogether, the middle tier requiring further schooling to access second-rate colleges only and only the high tier allowing university access. Usually, children are separated into these tiers by their teachers, at the end of primary school. While it's technically possible get back on the higher track when they're 16 or so, it is rare. Parental income/education and race is a huge predictor on which bucket a child ends up.
So let's say you were a "good child" and are allowed to the universities, prepare for long waiting times (years) unless you have a near-perfect grade average, in case you want to study something "popular" like medicine, business administration or law. Don't expect to get a seat at one of those crowded auditoriums, prepare to sit on the stairs. Also prepare to be "weeded out" early, especially in the technical fields. Fail a test in a course three times and you will not only be thrown out of your degree program, you are permanently barred from getting any degree that has that course in it. Failed your law degree? Maybe try computer science then!
Okay, let's say you went through all those filters, you finally get a degree. If you're got one of those "popular" degrees, it turns out that job competition is actually quite tough, because far more people have a degree than what the job market actually can absorb. It's still better than in Spain, Italy, Greece etc, where degrees are handed out like candy but actual jobs are as rare as gemstones.
Bottom Line: "Free College" just produces over-education, because most people choose popular degrees beyond what the market actually needs. With ISAs, at least there's an incentive to only support those degrees that are actually in-demand.