Yet government backed loans do not distinguish between majors and degree fields. A prospective poet is treated as having the same loan payback risk as the petroleum engineer.
We could expand this conversation to talk about useless bachelor degrees. Why do some people major in philosophy? How many job opening are there for philosophers?
Why major in women’s studies? While studying women may be fascinating on some level, how many job opening are there for studying women?
It’s crazy how we encourage more and more people to go to college, but don’t talk about how much debt people take on, or discuss what they are majoring in.
Most of them could, fairly easily, go into the student loan business by tapping just a fraction of those endowments and grow and replenish them as the loans were paid back.
You can bet that, if they did so, they would be charging a lower interest rate to someone studying to be a petroleum engineer versus someone studying to be a xxxx studies professor.
Since they could also revoke the credentials of someone who defaulted on their loan, you could also bet that the default rate would plunge.