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Comment by treeman79 | Hacker News Reader

Solution. Stop government funding.

For public universities, declining state government funding is the primary reason for tuition increases. Funding for the state university nearest me declined from the state providing more than over 75% of the budget in 2005 to under 25% last year, while the number of staff decreased. Unsurprisingly, tuition increased to make up much of that gap in funding.

Good luck finding a politician who will kill the dream of everybody going to college. The optics of that are pretty awful.

People went to college before the guaranteed "right" to go to college. It was also more affordable then - for some strange reason.

Removing government help won't end the college dream... but it might, in time - since it took time to get this fucked up - restore some semblance of reasonable to the equation.

It’s not a dream. It’s a nightmare for most folks. A girl I knew went to school for speech therapy. Decent grades. Good school. $80k debt for undergrad. Couldn’t get a job with a bachelor’s degree, so she racked up $100k getting a master’s degree. She’s 25 years old making $30k a year working for an agency that pairs her with kids that need help.

She has no conceivable way to pay that loan off on that salary. She will never qualify for a mortgage with that kind of debt to income ratio. The university promised this hopeful 18 year old child a dream job and a good wage to go with it and instead they basically destroyed her future.

The fraud universities are perpetuating makes the banks look like a freaking soup kitchen. The first politician who recognizes that this is modern day feudalism and has the guts to call it as such is going to be very successful.

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