> Look, the cost comes from somewhere. You earn it later and pay it later, in taxes or in loan service payments. Either way, you pay it. At least with a loan you have a shot at being done paying one day. And this sort of thing only makes sense as a nation managing a treasury if the people go on to make significantly more from their degrees.

Society benefits from having a highly educated population, even if wealth generated by that is squandered by a class of people, a society needs people to be educated to be able to innovate and generate new wealth.

If you are only thinking in financial terms there's no way for higher education to ever make sense in the long term, given that over time it slowly becomes the new status quo (as it's happening), and salaries won't ever continue to increase with higher education when there's a larger and larger share of the labour pool highly educated. It is still a net benefit to society to have highly educated people, there's more specialised labourers to draw from to transform ideas into wealth generation.

I don't think we should ever think of education in purely individual's finance terms, I gladly pay my taxes (in parts to fund education) in a country where I wasn't educated in because I know it benefits me in the end, more educated people helps to avoid economical stagnation.

It's not free lunch but giving everyone in a society an equal opportunity to achieve specialised education is a net positive in the long term, even if it costs a lot. The same with healthcare.

> With the way education is going, credentials no longer guarantee good pay, and if everyone can go "for free" then every job will require a degree

That already happens in the USA even with education being as expensive it is, I don't believe it's a sound argument...

>Look, the cost comes from somewhere.

yeah, the government let a private corporation manage it, and they lobbied for laws to make sure their loans are un-defaultable. It's just free, guaranteed money for them.

And college isn't getting more expensive because of higher costs, it's getting more expensive because they can add a bunch of fancy amenties that are used as advertisement, even if it doesn't directly help with the education aspect. Even 10 years ago there were thousands of dollars of costs per semester on misc. fees that I couldn't opt out of. it was basically a tax from my school.

So yeah, the cost comes from somewhere, and both the funders and the beneficiaries have every incentive to bloat it.

And there I am, with my double degrees from a German Unibersity and not a single Euro in student debt... Instead of the average of student debt in the US, we have a mortgage on hous, and a house obviously. All that despite paying taxes, which also cover stuff like higher education.

Because do not forget, you pay taxes in the US as well. On top of your student loans and whatnot.

And no, Germany tried to cut tuition fees already. Those were abolished after, if memory serves well, a year or two.