The problem with student debt has to be solved by finding out why the hell colleges are charging so much money in the first place.
It's insane. What I'm paying for my kid to go to Texas A&M dwarfs what I paid to go to Texas. I remember back then what it cost to go to TCU or SMU. We gasped at that $17,000 per year price tag back then. Now that's a drop in the bucket to go to a good state school.
The problem is, we've taken this mantra that "every kid needs to go to college." No, they don't. They don't teach much trade or other worthwhile work skills anymore, just prep for college. Then a lot of these kids barely graduate from some random school with a sociology degree as a C-student, and they're pretty useless in the real world in terms of career-oriented, high-paying opportunity jobs. So if you ran up $80,000 in student debt, you're looking at 40 years to pay that off.
I was talking to one of the Deans at A&M, and he told me that in 2000, they had 21,000 freshmen who applied. They take 9,000 a year. Today, they get over 50,000 applicants, and they still only take 9,000. And this despite pretty clear requirements, which is either graduating top 10% of your class or scoring a 30 on the ACT (they're about to move it to top 8% or a 33). The school now has 55,000 students, which is insane, as does UT, Michigan, Ohio State, and Illinois.
More applicants shouldn't explain higher cost. I don't know what that's based on. I'm guessing "grants" that line somebody's political pockets.
And what's even worse, only about a quarter of the schools our there are true universities and colleges. The others are glorified high schools giving away useless paper degrees with virtually no value.
