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In this case, government intervention is what caused the problem, and removing that intervention is what would disrupt the multi-million dollar industry.

Specifically, the government made it so college loans can't be discharged in bankruptcy, and backs many student loans.

The solution is to remove the exception for student debt in bankruptcy, and either have the government stop backing student loans, or make stricter requirements for colleges to quailify for its students qualifying for federal loans. Like say, require that a certain percentage of students graduate, and get jobs within a year of graduating, having reasonable tuition, etc.

Agree, but the result will be that far fewer kids get to go to college, or get to go to the best college that they can get into.

Loans will only be granted to students who have a track record of high achievement, parents willing to co-sign, and going into majors that make economic sense.

Enrollment will drop, universities will stop offering passion majors, mass layoffs in library science, academia, and college administrations (likely to the tune of 1M+ people).

In the end, students will be told by federal examination which school and major they get to pursue, or whether they get to go to college at all.

That's assuming the government is both effective and efficient in this process.

This is essentially how most consumer economics work.

But isn't it the goal? To make sure only the kids who have the brains and the right class to make value out of a degree (or don't care about value because their parents have cash), will go to study, not "just about everyone" as now. Working class kids without outstanding abilities should go to trade schools/apprenticeships and do blue collar labor. It pays decent bucks, and brings value to society too.

I think therec would also need to be a cultural shift to make trade schools and apprenticeships more acceptable, and make financial assistance for them more accessible.

And for that matter, I think it could make since to have trade schools for white colllar jobs too. In some sense that is what coding camps are, although I'd like to see them be a little more rigorous and include things like security, software design, algorithms, etc.

As for passion subjects and arts, maybe have more, and higher quality community classes available that people can go to when they already have a decent job and can pay for them outright instead of accruing massive debt.

> If we overdo on it, we get socialism. And we know how it always ends.

First, no, we have some high-visibility examples of dictators claiming to be socialists, several of whom had purges of other internal opponents who said socialism was a different thing to what they were doing.

We don't point to the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea"* or "The Democratic Republic of Congo" then say of Democracy (or of republics) "And we know how it always ends".

Second, there's a huge gap between what the USA considers "dangerously lefty" and what is seen in northern Europe today, let alone states today which are or were explicitly socialist such as the USSR.

* AKA North Korea, AKA Naughty Korea

No, i mean EU socialist countries. To the tune of Sweden, Netherlands, etc. That are little but sleepy retirement community with no ways to make money. Why would anyone with any ambition want to live there? So they don't. They go to America in spite of all it's horrors and sins. Live there once they made they money? Also no, because taxes, they go to the likes of Cyprus or Malta, or since recently, Spain [1]. These countries are good only if you are a taker, or a tourist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beckham_law

*points at my own profile*

I moved from the UK to Germany, I actively decided against the USA. Why? Consider what was going on politically in the US right after the UK voted for Brexit.

Σκεφτόμουν την Κύπρο, αλλά οι Άγγλοι λένε όταν κάτι είναι δύσκολο να διαβαστεί: "It's all greek to me"

European social democracies may not be the best if you want to get rich, but for average Joe they offer superior quality of life compared to the US. IMO too much capitalism and socialism both suck, and certain EU countries have the best balance between them.

Sweden? The country with one of the highest amounts of startups per capita? The Netherlands???

Are you sure you know what you're talking about?

What is the total cap of those startups? How does it compare with what IPOs in the Valley in a single year? We are probably talking about same "startups" as in Spain that people only open to get startup visas. There are multiple business plans mills there who specialise in writing plausible "sitcom startup" BPs for that purpose.

There have been a lot of socialist countries that were proper and strong democracies, notably India. The result? Hundreds of millions in abject poverty in India until socialism was given up in the 90s, and is slowly recovering.

Funny you say that, Karnataka is an outlier beating its peers in all quality of life metrics and has been run by communist for decades.

Also, modern day India has a very strong government intervention bias, especially regarding lifting people out of poverty. Be it investments in infrastructure (such as running water), or downright giving food to people. Good luck explaining how that isn't "socialism" to an American.

> Funny you say that, Karnataka is an outlier beating its peers in all quality of life metrics and has been run by communist for decades.

You mean Kerala, not Karnataka.

And conversely, West Bengal was ruled by the Communists since the 1970s to the early 2010s, yet it's developmental indicators have regressed to those comparable to some of the poorest states of India.

Conversely, right leaning and nativist Himachal Pradesh (if you ain't Pahadi or Pahadi-adjacent we will give you the cold shoulder, and both the state chapters of the HP INC and BJP trace their origins to the RSS and Arya Samaj) has developmental indicators that can match Kerala and other traditionally richer states in India.

At the end of the day, all that matters is administrative capacity, not ideology.

If local government is held accountable, it will work hard to deliver.

> Who's fault it is that they are dumb?

They are young. And therefore there is an asymmetry in information.

That, probably can and should be fixed. Set a minimum age for someone to take a college loan to say 21. Otherwise, a parent takes it and it's subtracted from a parents' social security check before it does from kid's. Then people will think twice. Maybe that's fair.

Good idea. I think kids in high school should also be shown some real stats about monetary outcomes from different degrees. Not BS marketing material from educational institutions, but actual statistics. The whole society would benefit if number of students in different fields would roughly match labor market demand.

how many people do you think even understand “actual statistics”? i was reading a study done by actuaries working at one of the largest reinsurers in the world, and they made conclusions based on confidence level values overlapping, which is a nontrivial mistake i identified within seconds. and these are actuaries, people who by and large, so understand statistics. how do you expect the average person to interpret any of it when they struggle to understand what a rate of change (inflation) is?

Yep, and kids also smoke, vape, do drugs, gamble, assault people, play too many video games, etc.

The answers lie in educating them to make good decisions, and be there to help when good decisions happen to turn out poorly. The current dilemma is largely due to provably bad decisions (by students, banks, universities, government).

Are student loans the most pressing "bad decision" we have as a society? Definitely not. Is it a very electable topic? Yep

I question utility of that reduction. When you reduce complex situations to simple words like 'socialism' you lose nuance and predictive power. It's not binary. It's more or less. Canada is more socialist than USA. Norway is more socialist than Canada.

Reducing to "is" or "isn't" doesn't help understand the problem or come up with viable solutions.

If we go along the route of "asking the government to ban every line of business where people waste money getting no value for it or even getting harmed, being driven by systematic delusion", as it is with the higher education - we will shoot ourselves in the foot in a massive massive way as this will kill almost all web startups as this is what they are - use manipulative tactics, knowingly false expectation and social effects to force people to spend money on... well nothing really. And the lower your chance of getting something in return, the more you pay (classic example are dating apps). I go to startup events frequently. Took me a few years to accept the truth that speaking about any industry (their slang for it is "vertical") - well, any except porn - like dating, pharma, so-called "nutra", etc. they actually mean "scam in the field of X", and the main idea of every successful one is "a genius way to obscure it is a scam".

For God's sake, it will even kill custom software development which most people sitting here, do for a living - because it is the same exact thing - vast majority of clients never get what they want and even if they did they won't be able to make the money on the useless "products" they invented, because this is nothing but a systematic delusion that's moving them. Almost all of them see themselves as genius inventors of the next world-changing thing but they are in fact random nobodies who raised cash from other random nobodies, to waste it on something that makes their contractors laugh so badly they even refrain from doing video calls. It's even worse than higher education. I seen multiple software dev companies throwing lavish parties on the April Fool's day as "professional holiday of our clients".

Should we first look at ourselves in the mirror before blaming the college cabal for doing the same as we do ourselves, just more successfully?

I said is I don't see the utility in reducing the concept from a continuum to a binary "is/isn't"

You seem to have doubled down on the is/isn't perspective and demonstrated what I was referring to. The more you reduce the less useful your reasoning becomes.

No, with high student loans, you are not supporting high talents; you are supporting the rich only. You are obstructing a lot of potential that poor students might have realized if they could have afforded it. It's not about banning universities; it's about broadening accessibility. Schools are state-funded for the same reason.

Socialism is a term too broad to mean anything. When we say socialism, do we include states that provide healthcare systems as infrastructure, as is common across the world? Do we include the vast amounts of market interference represented by decisions about what crimes can be hidden behind a corporate veil, what companies win lucrative government contracts to have decades of non-competitive profits?

The attitude that the government shouldn't intervene against companies on the behalf of human rights has been tried for fifty years, and it is an unprecedented failure even in financial terms for at least roughly 80% of the population of one of the largest and wealthiest countries in the world in terms of real purchasing power. Even for many of us in higher income brackets, the resulting crumbling infrastructure and drastic wealth disparities leave much to be desired as a society to live in. Many of these problems have solutions, and calling them "socialism" is meaningless as an argument against them

> We shouldn't see the government as solution to too many problems. If we overdo on it, we get socialism. And we know how it always ends.

With a place in the top 10 happiest countries? https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...