[fungoking]

Only allow student loans for degrees for careers that offer a good opportunity to make enough money to make the payments.

You want a race or gender studies degree fine, just don’t ask the taxpayer to underwrite your loan.

[Mouton]

I know one who has a BA in fine arts. He is working at the city waste water facility...very fitting.

[Vigilanteman]

That seems logical, as would getting the government out of the loan business completely and letting the private finance companies charge interest rates based on the marketability of fields of study.

Political reality is that some bailout is inevitable. A partial bailout in return for getting the government out of the loan business completely would be a bargain.

Logical Six Point solution to the student loan crisis:

1. Write off 25%. This is a necessary concession to the debtors who, in many cases, were duped into taking out loans they couldn't afford.
   
2. Return 75% to the institutions of origin for collection.
   
3. Institutes get to keep 5% of the 75% for their trouble but must remit the 70% back to the government.
   
4. They are free to hold up transcripts, cancel degrees and employ all the other measures they did to collect against the debtors as when they were students.
   
5. If the institutions still cannot pay back the government within the normal loan times, the government is free to attach their endowments, real estate and other assets.
   
6. Government gets completely out of the loan business and encourages the institutions to line up their own lenders. If a tiny college like Hillsdale (Michigan) can do it, then there is no reason anyone else can't do the same.

   Yes, the taxpayer takes a 30% hit up front to liquidate this crisis, but that is far better than continuing to grow this monster.

[RainMan]

My thought has been to tie tuition to Y3 post graduate earnings and employment % in the field of study. The formula would be simple. Avg Y3 earnings (in the field of study) * % employed in field of study = max tuition that could be charged for the degree.

In other words, a school could have a degree in gender studies, but if only 5% of the graduates get jobs in gender studies, and those jobs only pay $32K/year, then the school would not be able to charge more than $1,600 for the degree TOTAL ($32K * 5%). I dont know of many schools that would charge you $1,600 for 4 years of education.

Finally, I would completely eliminate student loans, and instead implement a employment "seeding" program. Employers could pledge money to schools to cover a percentage of the costs of a program (it would have to be a full term commitment of funds). The more a company pledges to a school, the more graduates they will be ALLOWED to hire. Students being given the grants would receive paid internships with the employers each summer, to give the student experience and the employer the opportunity to determine if they want to continue to fund this student, or move their funding to a different student.

The benefits of a program like this would be multiple:
1. It would dramatically lower tuition costs across the board. 2. Employers would become very specific as to what degrees they valued and why 3. Students would be motivated to perform each and every year while in school, for fear of loosing their funding 4. Employment straight out of school would be pretty much guaranteed. 5. The taxpayer would be off the hook for the cost of higher education completely. We would not be underwriting bad loans, nor would we be paying the cost for a department of women studies. 6. The entire concept of tenure would vaporize, because colleges would require accountability from their professors when their precious little snowflakes crashed and burned in the real world and it caused the school to have to issue refunds to students.