We stopped sufficient investment in public, post secondary education.
I attended SUNY Buffalo in the late 80s / early 90s. I found some old bills when cleaning out my attic several years ago. Tuition was $1,350/yr. At that time, the minimum wage was $3.35/hr. So one could theoretically work a minimum wage job over the summer for 10 weeks and pay for tuition (403 hours). Today the tuition is $10,782 and the min. wage is $14.20. So a student today would need to work nearly 2x as long (760 hours) to pay for tuition.
I'm not trying to single out the SUNY system. I think the problem is nationwide.
I think a lot of this is driven by the fact that people are more mobile. When its your kids went to, and grandkids going to the school down the street, then you are more likely to support higher taxes to pay for it. But when you live in a different state from your grandkids, and your tax dollars will not benefit your family, you're much less likely to want to subsidize the education of other peoples grandkids.
I place less blame on taxpayers and more blame on exploding administration costs.
On other hand, my alma matter - University of California system - cost $4500 per year in in-state tuition alone when I graduated in 2000 when minimum wage here was around $5 and it’s under $15000 today when minimum wage is $15.50
So it appears that people in California do support public education fairly consistently.
This is one of the positive outcomes of crazy taxation regime we have here.
I am of course ignoring the 800lb gorilla of college affordability - housing costs. Those are craZy here in Nimbyland
From that page, it looks like in 1990 the UC tuition was $864/semseter, and the min. wage was $3.80/hr. So it was roughly the same affordability as the SUNY system at that time (except for the gigantic UC student services fee that was more than tuition -- we didn't have that, and kept voting against D1 athletics to keep it that way).
Going the other way, SUNY tuition was $3,400 and the min wage was $5.15 in 2000. That puts us 1/2 way to the rates we have today.
So something clearly happened in the 1990s that raised tuition in multiple states. You can see that in the (SUNY) chart here (https://www.buffalo.edu/provost/oia/facts-publications/factb...) where there were 2 huge tuition increases (over 25% each) in the 1990s.
I think CA public funding "dropped" from 30ish% in the 70s to 15ish% more recently. However, enrollment and costs have gone way up. The only way to keep it up is to increase revenues, decrease cost, or cap enrollment. None of those have much support. So the increased cost goes to the student.
"Sales and Services" in this context presumably include things like transportation, housing, and dining, often covered by the same funding sources as tuition and fees, that represent a significant portion of a student's total cost.
For example, the cheapest on-campus meal plan at UC Berkeley is $6,260 per academic year[1] for 12 dining hall meals a week plus a $600/semester in credit for other food[2], and
($6,260 - $1,200)/(8 * 4 weeks) = $158.13/week
for 1.7 meals a day seems steep for dorm food, especially if we also assume $600/semester is sufficient to cover the remaining 9 meals, given that
$1,200/(8 * 4 * 9 meals) = $4.17/meal.
On an annualized academic year basis, this is
$6,260 - $4.17 * 8 * 4 * 7 * 3 = $3,457.76
less than the cost of the meal plan.
And while dining out in Berkeley at $4/meal is unrealistic, living on $100/week of groceries as a non-student is not[3], so $3,000/year seems like a reasonable figure for the net food cost of an on-campus UC Berkeley academic year.
[3] Source: I can eat frugally but well on $10/day in Indianapolis, and both random Web sites and official government statistics both suggest bay area grocery prices are roughly 25% higher.
The collateral is your future earnings. These loans rarely get discharged. They'll get their money, even if it takes them a lifetime. Maybe not for every individual, but a large enough portion of the population.
>> There are higher Direct Unsubsidized annual loan limits for borrowers enrolled in certain health professions programs, and special loan limits for certain students who are not enrolled in a program that leads to a degree or certificate awarded by the school they are attending.
So, more of that, except linked to objective workforce measurements instead of cherry picking professions.
> see also: *the* suggested plan to give thousands to every new home buyer to help address affordability
Would still get the idea and issue across without the need to mention the 'who'. It does not change the meaning or the concern by adding in the 'who'. If that part was changed to any other name, would it still be a problem?
Whether disparaging or promoting, naming the plan can be beneficial. It's pretty common to have multiple plans for the same topic/issue and calling out which one by the sponsor can differentiate it.
Uh, in politics, plans are promoted by individuals. If a plan X is promoted by Y individual, describing the plan as "X's plan to Y" is simply an objective statement - if it is true (which a shallow Google search seems to say in this case).
It is injecting partisan into the discussion but in the end, we need to discuss partisan politics well rather than avoid it. I mean, I'd broadly say we're stuck currently with Democrats promoting bad policies of laying band-aids across the disastrous marketization policies of the past while the Republicans mindless "cut things", killing what good about the state and maintaining the worst policies (see the "national monument effect" etc).
I mentioned it as Biden's plan because that is the referent of who proposed the plan, not out of some opposition to Biden. [0] It is truly easiest to reference policies by who proposed them.
> If that part was changed to any other name, would it still be a problem?
I would ask the same of you. Frankly, I don't think I would have gotten a reply like this and downvoted if it hadn't been mentioning the president on an election year.
> It is truly easiest to reference policies by who proposed them.
But for everyone bathed in the constant nuclear radiation of "{name}'s policy!!", it's going to remind people of the last time they saw a partisan clickbait mass media headline.
If you want to engage people's curiosity, probably better to reference nameless policies around elections.
Tldr - political news sucks, avoid anything that resembles it
> If you want to engage people's curiosity, probably better to reference nameless policies around elections.
I pretty much exclusively use HN as a refuge from that style of conversation.
I'm sorry that so many people's brains are poisoned by political news or whatever, but I'm not really going to change what I find is a useful way of referring to things just to accommodate them.
FWIW I am certainly going to vote for Biden, for all the good that it will do in California.
The biggest problem is the fundamental inability of two higher education camps: "education should be free" and "education should be market priced" to agree on anything.
It would be better to have a mix: free education slots for students who pass (tough-ish) entrance exams and slots that university can add at market price for students who do not meet the bar. If there are more market price applications than slots schools can select any way they want except on price (i.e., all market rate slots should be priced the same). My 2c.
"It would be better to have a mix: free education slots for students who pass (tough-ish) entrance exams and slots that university can add at market price for students who do not meet the bar."
We already have this on a small scale and in niches. Scholarships are essentially giving free or reduced cost slots to performance graded people. Then we have other free (or later forgiven) slots based on service, such as GI bill and teach for America, etc. There are all sorts of ways to get free/reduced/forgiven tuition if it's important enough to someone.
The bigger problem is the marketing and credentialing. Companies want credentials, schools want students, and so it's sold from multiple angles as the necessary thing to do for a good job. We end up with people getting junk degrees to work gate-kept jobs for low wages. Or they can't even get a job in their field.
Clearly the market is broken, but free tuition isn't going to fix the problems either.
I don't think the market is broken, I do think it has been heavily distorted by government intervention though. I think you are correct that credentialism is a problem here. For those who suggest free tuition for everyone (government funded), I would ask how that would solve this particular problem. It seems like it would worsen this problem and probably lead to an even larger shortage of people going in the trades.
I would consider distortion at this magnitude to be broken. It's pretty much stuck in a vicious cycle of number of degrees increasing from accessibility, businesses increasing demand for credentials because there are more of them, demand for easy loans increasing, etc. It would take a monumental shift to fix this from multiple areas of society.
The problem with scholarships is that the criteria is not clear and selection is (at least seen as being) at a whim of whoever is in charge at the moment.
Merit slots, given via clear exams, give everyone a good idea of whether they are likely to get in or not, for example by doing practice tests and looking at passing scores from previous years.
If those merit slots are limited (just due to the facility and staff limits they would need to be), then you will run into the same scenario. It will become competitive without a strict standard required. We see this with the specialty public schools at the primary and secondary levels already.
> [merit slots] will become competitive without a strict standard required
Yes, and I see this as a good thing. If someone wants free tuition at a top university, they have to be very good, way above average. Free tuition at a good, but not top school would be a lot less competitive, but still require ability and work.
And we should also get away from the current state where everyone feels compelled to spend 4-5 years on higher education after school. That's a fad of the last 30 years and it is not a healthy one for the society. My 2c.
"Yes, and I see this as a good thing. If someone wants free tuition at a top university, they have to be very good, way above average. Free tuition at a good, but not top school would be a lot less competitive, but still require ability and work."
For example in the US today, scholarships are competitive (as any free money is), but the selection criteria has little to do with merit. Even top universities (MIT, Stanford, Harvard) specifically do not provide merit-based financial aid. There are some exceptions with private scholarships, but those are few. The majority of scholarships and grants are federal or federal+school, where the state puts a lot of specific requirements on the students, mostly based on need with some social mobility mixed in.
The result is that students go through a rigmarole that has very little to do with proving merit for the chosen field to the grant-givers who are themselves far removed from teaching or research in that field.
What I am talking about is a clear set of entrance exams given (or agreed to) by the university itself. No intermediaries, pure merit. This is very far from how the scholarships work in the US today.
The main issue with this approach is that it doesn't help people who struggle financially or come from disfavorable backgrounds -- whom federal student loans aimed to help.
Some sets of circumstances don't favor score maximization on such tests, whereas being in a high income family favors prior access to education that help get those scores for instance. Ergo you'd not solve a better access to education that way.
Similarly, means testing for those slots also has negatives incentives. It's a hard issue to solve.
Test scores are one of the primary vehicles for social mobility in modern America. There are other reasons for correlations between affluence and test scores beyond just environmental unfairness.
Federal student loans themselves have always expressed the tension in parent poster's dichotomy.
On the one hand, we could fund college for only those who need the help.
On the other hand, that would be a political shitstorm because people with means wouldn't receive as much (or potentially even any) benefit.
So the system now has lots of loopholes and sliding scales, so that everyone gets some benefit and supports it. Replace states with families, and it's the NASA approach to political support.
Personally, I think the removal of objective testing is dumb. It may be income/background correlated, but it is objective.
You can address the disparities by providing benefit to those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds.
More critically, you want a system that doesn't allocate money to 'dumb/lazy but also from an advantaged background'.
The biggest problem is the fundamental inability of two higher education camps: "education should be free" and "education should be market priced" to agree on anything.
What does that mean? The two camps disagree fundamentally - so "the problem is they don't agree"? Why should they be expected to agree something? Perhaps they could agree that "Paris is the Capital France" (see Kids In The Hall's Brain Candy).
Education is clearly a path to increased prosperity for many people, and they will pay a lot for education to try to distinguish themselves. And when it's nearly an expectation, it's not a completely voluntary purchase (like healthcare), so demand is quite inelastic and people will pay what is charged. (And also it is a spending choice at quite an early age when people are not great at thinking about whether taking on debt is a smart choice, etc)
My theory is that as our society matured, people/companies/institutions gradually figured out that education was something that they could extract value ($) from and take a cut out of. (Whether that is just blatant profit, or using the money to invest in education-related things, or even less insidious semi-reasonable employment of lots of people in that industry to benefit off of it. A gradual creeping up of somewhat well-intentioned desire to turn it from classes in just-good-enough lecture halls into polished buildings that need endowments and administrators to oversee.)
The problem is when goods that are pretty mandatory to succeed in life get turned to the for-profit market to be solved, of course prices will go up.
What we are increasingly failing at is to offer enough seats at high quality educational institutions at affordable prices. That's how you get out of this.
>This led to rising enrollment of relatively disadvantaged students, but primarily at poor-performing, low-value institutions whose students systematically failed to complete a degree, struggled to repay their loans, defaulted at high rates, and foundered in the job market.
In the USA, reverse discrimination was found to be criminal. Some universities implemented illegal systems to continue doing this which turned out to be extremely abusive to minorities.
Politicians still wanted to get minorities educated, and so they not only did this, but they also set it such that you can't bankrupt the debt.
What was the effect? Univerisity risk greatly reduced and so tuition has been climbing every year since.
You now have a cohort of people who in their prime years are paying down debt and not investing, not taking risks at entrepreneurship. They are also hit with so much debt that it might be decades before they truly start their life. The college-apprentice path simply by not having tremendous debt is by default going to be the safer path.
Oh, I thought the article was going to talk about the fiasco with the FAFSA application redesign. In which case my observation was going to be, people in charge of things at the top lately seem to have almost zero idea of what actually needs to happen at the working level of their organizations.
It seems to be a general theme these days in government, business, a lot of things.
A large part of that seems to be because we filled middle management with "yes" men. The real concerns get candy coated before it ever reached the authorities. It also seems the people at the top actually believe their PR, like that a college education is the primary key to a good life.
There’s no real downward pressure on the amount of money loaned out to students, other than the ability of teenagers to do due diligence and plan ahead.
Exempting student loans from normal bankruptcy was a really stupid move. Of course if you treat this one type of loan as some special thing where the lender doesn’t assume any risk, the lender won’t take any care about how they make the loans. And the price of a degree would never have been able to grow out of control like this if students were given loans appropriate to their ability to pay them.
I mean, I think education should be heavily subsidized as well, but let’s start by not perturbing the market in the most harmful way possible.
Yes I consider myself somewhere on the democratic socialist/social democrat border but I wish policy makers would at least start by looking at what pressures their policies will apply in our mostly capitalist system. The market works fine for lots of things as long as you don’t break it.
Everyone in this thread forgot that free education was the norm and worked fine until someone didn't like the "wrong type of people" going to college. The experiment failed. Revet to something that worked, and go from there. Any suggestion otherwise is foolish and ignorant.
We shouldn’t try to replicate the experience of people in the vast majority of history. We should try to replicate the experience of the in-group of the US from like 1950-2000. The quality of life for the in-group during the era was anomalously high, and also the US of that were was an incredibly effective country.
Yes, we should try to bring up everyone to the highest standard of living possible. I just have no patience for suggestions that for most people that standard of living was higher in the past and we simply need to return to it.
It's false, ahistorical nostalgia for the past. A well known psychological effect that distorts peoples understanding of how much the past actually sucked in reality. People watching shows like Bridgerton always imagine they would be among the nobility.
Can you point me to more info on “free college” of the past?
I know that for this immigrant few years off the boat, federal grants and deferred interest loans was what gave me access to education that would otherwise put a huge burden on my family at the time.
Granted this was for an engineering degree at a public university and amounted to no more than 10-20k as opposed to 200k for an art degree at a private art college that we often read about
When I went to college, I stayed in a dorm that was built in 1930. The classrooms I was taught in were built in the 1960s. They were all built on state land, and paid for before I started in the late 90s. The teachers were paid a modest salary, roughly 2-3x the salary of an elementary school teacher. Fast forward 30 years. The same dorms are still housing the students. The same classrooms are still instructing the students. The teachers are still paid a modest salary, proportional to an elementary school teacher, and yet - the costs have skyrocketed?? Yes, they built a new student center, and computer labs, but those were built just a few years after I graduated, and the prices hadn’t dramatically increased.
Today, the prices have tripled. The money is going somewhere, and I’m certain some simple graphs would reveal the cause. After all the people complaining about the skyrocketing costs, I’ve yet to see these charts. Where are the investigative reporters?
I expect to find wasteful hiring and departments full of non-student facing faculty, whose salaries aren’t paid for by grants. I expect to find not just one IT department for the university, but an IT department for each college. Even the residence life had a 10 person IT department back when I attended, and I remember being horrified at the waste. These organizations have likely grown. I expect to find the sports organization, including basketball and footballs are no longer a revenue engine, but have grown to be a parasite through creative accounting. I expect the non revenue generating sports, which were a questionable destination of funds back when I attended, have grown. Why was I, as a student, funding a world class swimming team? I never attended a match. My tuition included an invisible “tax” to fund these athletics.
Instead of pushing to roll back the finances to the pre-2000 levels, the university continues to raise rates, and the students continue to attend, because the loans continue to get approved.
So, when I hear politicians asking for student loan forgiveness, without asking the hard questions on why these costs have skyrocketed, and putting a system in place to roll back these hikes, I’m disgusted. It does nothing to solve the problem. Cap the loan amounts, retroactive to inflation adjusted from 2000. The universities will quickly have to figure out if they really need a synchronized swimming team, or three website designers for the dorm web page.
I'm absolutely with you. If you want to attend state institutions in your home state, and maybe even as targeted as in your region in your state, the tuition should be free.
The problem is, states are not pulling their share of costs. It's federal dollars and loans or other private payments.
We already have free primary and secondary education. Perhaps we should be asking how we can improve those institutions so people don't feel compelled to pursue post-secondary studies for career tracks that could be addressed by those institutions.
As for loans, they are a poor tool to improve accessibility to higher education and will agree that tuition (as well as many education related expenses) should be free for those who need it.
It is probably infeasible to cram all of this into secondary school.
Hard to imagine being able to learn how to be a doctor or get to "useful" in electrical engineering
It is also probably too hard to even do this for technical training that is almost required now for manufacturing jobs.
To me this points to a tertiary level of education that is academic or technical/professional.
I think that broadening this education out to "blue collar" job education (which is in fact these days highly skilled) will also increase political support for it.
I agree that lower level institutions need adjustments. I went to a state school and was genuinely surprised when I discovered how many of my peers struggled with reading books (short non-fiction, long classics, etc) or writing any sort of paper (creative, research, etc). This seems like straight gambling to me - people who are barely literate taking out loans to in the hopes of landing a good job. The schools don't care, they just want their money.
Alternatively, if we provided the first 13 years free, why can't we provide 4 more years? That includes vocational education for welders/electricians/plumbers etc. Ideally we find a way to extend the community college model to 4 year degrees without them being corrupted into the same financial issues.
> Tuition is free for a lot of low income students.
That's not what was said. Tuition should be free. That's it.
I'm not sure why people are opposed to something we've done successfully in the past. I mean, the current situation is a result of Reagan not wanting the "wrong type of people" going to college. Why do we want to hold on to this and hurt Americans? Why?
The likelihood of being accepted into Harvard when being raised in a family with that total income is extremely low. The environment for studying, focus, discipline, mental health, etc. simply requires more material security.
$150k is about double the US median houshold income. By most definitions, exceeding that number makes you upper class. Of course there are areas that need local adjustments, but for most of the country, $100k-150k is a comfortable upper-middle class income.
"Tuition should be free to those that achieve admission to a public school"
Sounds like a recipe for gaming the admission standards or setting caps on admissions. It might not be a bad idea with the right safeguards in place, but it would be a mess if we just threw that into the current system.
Of course there are other options that exist today. Scholarships are essentially the same model you are proposing, only with higher standards. Plus, almost anyone who wants free tuition (including to private schools) can enlist in the military.
Have they figured it out for the US? The funding is a contentious issue. We've seen free tution schools in CA slip into paying large "fees". It's a similar story for previously free universities throughout the country. The money has to come from somewhere and most people hate taxes.
I don't think it's hindsight where the problems could be seen.
It's econ 101 that markets can produce rational allocation of resources but only if they are involve people with the information and time to determine the outcome and those people are working with their own money. A system where the state "gives"/"loans" your customers money and then forces them to spend that money on you produces a industry that has neither the discipline of skin-in-the-game markets nor the discipline of state regulation.
It's not that younger borrowers aren't price sensitive at all. Cost tends to be the first deciding factor, unless the particular student is considering prestige of institution.
This is why fewer students are attending small, private, expensive colleges.
The dynamic is not that simple. There are a multitude of reasons behind the increase in the cost of postsecondary education. Waving it away as young people just being young people is sort of silly.
No, student loans don't "have problems". They are problems. It's not they were ill-conceived but that they were conceived at all. College education (as well as health care) is an example of an activity that doesn't benefit from being guided primarily by the market.
In a sense, both student loans and health insurance target the wrong thing: How to preserve established institutions by making sure that they get their money, not how to deliver education (and research) and health care to people. I think in 100 years we'll look back on subsidized private universities, and subsidized private hospitals, as obviously bad ideas.
I think the way to solve both is to let the state own both systems. Publicly funded research and education can occur at state universities. The private colleges can do whatever they want with their own money, until they're small enough to drown in a bathtub, or they can go back to primarily serving as seminaries.
Even if you dislike markets as a mechanism, education is very tricky because it's very very expensive, and prone to important moral hazards when it's free.
Think your passion is economics or psychology and drop out after 1.5 years ? You've just cost the equivalent of 8 years of tax money from the average joe (ex: France median after tax income is 25k, roughly 2k of tax money, each college year is 10-12k).
It turns out there aren't enough average joes to give every kid the opportunity to try multiple studies, so we have to share the burden, at least a little bit. The average joe can pay 70%, and the students 30%. Or the average joe pays 90% of the first curriculum, but if you "reset" once (change majors without transfers), then the average joe no longer pays that share and only pays 50%. But you have to accept that education isn't free and there should be some incentive, even if small, to make sure you're picking something you'll commit to and make it work.
Even if you dislike markets as a mechanism, education is very tricky because it's very very expensive, and prone to important moral hazards when it's free.
Education is not inherently expensive. The student loan mechanisms are what allowed the vast expansion of colleges as capital intensive enterprises. You can find a multitude of discussion about how cheap both public and private education was in, say, the 1960s. And that was with primarily state/institutional regulation. Which is to say the student loans were moral hazard crack to compared to state regulation.
For most subjects, one needs an informed teacher, a class room and some books. Somehow this costs vast sums now. Guess why?
More details:
You need practicing, so you need experiments/computers/supplies/projects — this is true both in engineering and art school, any time you do anything that's not completely pen and paper.
You also need to divert time from your researchers to teaching activities. You need to pay for classrooms, that's real estate, plumbing, electricity, etc.
Keeping up with the state of the art in research isn't cheap, and using part of those funds to purely teach and not compete with other countries is an investment that's not neutral.
The market was/is responding to the environment that was created by the department of education.
It’s quite weird that you blame solely ‘the market’ but totally ignore the role the federal gov has had in this. I read somewhere about 90% of student loan debt is from federally backed loans ?
You think getting rid of competition the market provides and making the gov the sole issuer, creditor, and policemen of student loans would create cheaper education? Lol
It’s quite weird that you blame solely ‘the market’ but totally ignore the role the federal gov has had in this.
There is no place I say anything like "it's the market, not the fed". The Federal Government initiated it's (pseudo) market "reforms" and so certainly bares considerable blame for the outcome. My main point that whole approach was bad rather than the approach having implementation problems.
The primary beneficiary of treating productive young people is society itself, and they are also the most efficient to treat. The primary beneficiary of existing socially subsidized care is the elderly. Since this is the optimally bad outcome, it is reasonable to assert that every system of healthcare incentives is misaligned.
I don't necessarily disagree. I would say the problem is capitalism, which is not to be confused with "the market." They are distinctly different things.
I've got a weird relationship with market socialists because I generally think they're much more sensible and convincing than the average "destroy evil and create utopia" socialists, but ultimately it's hard to understand whether their efforts to rebuild society would yield much better outcomes compared to European style welfare capitalism with more taxation and welfare spending.
I suppose they're trying to build a grand theory of social market economies / social democracy, which is nice.
saying the problem is capitalism is basically a non-answer to me.
anything that exists today can be called capitalism, nobody has a clear definition of what is constitutive and it is not a useful diagnosis for offering prescriptions on how to make it better
1. Doctor cartels (this one is sort of self-explanatory) and other provider coordination on pricing
2. Over expansion of insurance (insurance is not meant to cover things that are expected, we have expanded insurance to cover routine expected expenses) and the associated costly administrative structure
3. Lack of price transparency
4. Global free ridership on drug prices makes us think we could get new drugs for much cheaper than we could
5. Lack of neutrality in tax law between cadillac health insurance plans and income
6. Overutilization (partially due to fear of malpractice lawsuits, partially due to overexpansion of insurance)
7. Political failure to address any of these. Obama tried to resolve 5 and Trump tried to resolve 3. Both have essentially failed.
Almost all of these are caused by bad policy more so than the market-based outcome. This is not a ranked list, if I had to find primary culprits it would be 2, 3, and 6.
Your employer offers health insurance. You go to doctors who bill the insurance company for your services.
You paying directly for your services is almost entirely removed from the equation.
You even deciding on which insurance company you would like to use is removed from the equation as well because it’s more expensive for you to sign up directly than it is for your company to sign up as well.
If you wanted to be a part of a private insurance group with diet and exercise requirements for membership, including annual physicals that could potentially get you a lower rate…but you don’t really get that option. The market doesn’t even get to attempt to provide that option because of how separated the producer and consumer of the service are from the people paying for it.
The market is completely removed from the equation.
The only person who proposed a plan that would have resolved this problem was Dr Ben Carson fwiw. It was by far the best solution to fixing healthcare in the US that I’ve heard in the last 20 years but instead we got ACA.
My guess is they're talking about regional monopolies ?
There's generally a misunderstanding from left wing voters — when people say "markets" they understand "crony capitalism and monopolies with regulatory capture" when most other people just mean "fair competition between suppliers".
We'll all agree the second option isn't easy to get, but the disagreement often comes from the fact one team thinks it's impossible or even undesirable, and something more radical should be preferred.
Student loans were designed to do exactly what they did (very successfully):
1. Allowed Universities to exponentially increase tuition/room & board costs that would have otherwise been unaffordable by the market; and
2. Indebted millions of 18-22 years olds for the next 40 years of their lives or their entire working lives until they were eligible for social security at age 62.
Perhaps what wasn’t anticipated was the job market and economy failing so miserably that borrowers wouldn’t be able to service their loans and default in mass, although this slowly occurred over 30 years so the writing was on the wall but like most disasters it was (and still is) ignored. Eventually things would turn so bad economically that student loan borrowers would in mass return home after college until their mid 30’s, forego marriage and children.
I attended SUNY Buffalo in the late 80s / early 90s. I found some old bills when cleaning out my attic several years ago. Tuition was $1,350/yr. At that time, the minimum wage was $3.35/hr. So one could theoretically work a minimum wage job over the summer for 10 weeks and pay for tuition (403 hours). Today the tuition is $10,782 and the min. wage is $14.20. So a student today would need to work nearly 2x as long (760 hours) to pay for tuition.
I'm not trying to single out the SUNY system. I think the problem is nationwide.
I think a lot of this is driven by the fact that people are more mobile. When its your kids went to, and grandkids going to the school down the street, then you are more likely to support higher taxes to pay for it. But when you live in a different state from your grandkids, and your tax dollars will not benefit your family, you're much less likely to want to subsidize the education of other peoples grandkids.