Well gee...Looking for a conservative solution to the student loan problem.
How about the old fashioned one, you know, don’t make financial committments one can’t possibly keep. When one is playing Three Card Monte with other peoples money there’s little incentive to be fiscally responsible.
Old school way of my age cohort was to work summers and after school to SAVE money for college. To work part-time during the school year and during summers. I If one didn’t have enough money for a full academic load one worked full time and took night classes. Took longer but one it certainly focused one’s efforts to actually learn and look forward to a debt free degree.
That work experience also translated into higher starting salaries and a more responsile position upon entering the market place. If the prior work experience was in one’s chosen so much the better.
Tough? You betcha! So is life.
I think much of that is valid, but in our times, paying your way through for all of college is simply not gonna be an option for everyone who wants to get a college degree.
For starters, there are many colleges where tuition alone is 20,000 - 40,000 dollars a year - which means that cost does not include room and board, books, additional fees and any other living expenses one might incur. The probability of students earning enough through part time jobs during school and during summer to cover all of that are increasingly low. Some will be able to do it but not all will. Especially if they are a STEM major.
In the short term, it is unlikely that this will change. Which is why I was thinking that one of the first 5 options I listed at the start of this thread.
I do think in the long term, your solutions would work for sure once we get rid of the idea that college is for everyone - which has become very deeply ingrained in people’s heads. Get more of them acclimated to the idea of trade schools and community colleges and bring academic standards back to where they were before. End the unproductive majors. Then, tuition could go back to where it used to be and students could afford it with a combination of scholarships and working, something that millions of them just will not be able to do right now.
BTW, as I asked another poster, I had listed the methods by which i had paid for college. Do you think that the methods by which I had paid for college were unreasonable? I would have to concur that if my family had no money at the time, I do may have incurred about 20000-3000 worth of student loans, and it would have been so I could work 14 hours a day 7 days a week in order to prepare myself for getting into a STEM PhD tack, which would allow me to earn more than enough to pay it all back.