We’ve been solving the wrong problem for decades and backstopping the problem by blaming colleges. People weren’t doing this until most of the decent paying factory and related jobs went to India, China, and Bangladesh. Back in the day, kids right out of high school could get jobs that could at least net you a comfortable life in a small apartment, and depending on the industry, possibly on the path to home ownership. Today, that path is mostly gone, and as such people who would have never seen college as something they want are shunted to college where they would compete with more diligent scholars for a dwindling (thanks computer networks and soon enough add AI to this) number of desk jobs where they pretend to care about excel spreadsheets of meaningless data.

The actual problem isn’t college or student loans. Those problems would solve themselves if we solved the actual problem— there aren’t enough good jobs that actually pay a living wage, and because there are so few, businesses are requiring college (and doing more above that at this point like an MA and internships) to the tune of mortgage levels of cost. If there were enough “can live on my own and possibly afford to have children” paying jobs the business could not hide them behind the paywall of college because someone else wouldn’t and the employees would choose that path instead. If we focused on creating those jobs, and therefore creating a situation where businesses compete for workers instead of one in which workers compete for jobs, then people would choose college less often and costs would go down a bit to attract more students.