“Have the college get the bill if the student defaults due to being unable to find a job. Overnight, colleges will stop accepting students who don’t belong in college, and will stop offering majors that will not lead to a job (except if you’re rich and paying cash).”
I’ve never entertained an idea like this before. In theory it could really be effective it seems to me. Imagine the implications!
Professors and administrators around the country would howl like a wounded dog.
It might result from the feds getting out of the guaranteed student loan business. If the colleges wanted students, then they would need to step up and be the loan issuers. With their own endowments (and thus the faculty's pensions) on the line, they would tend to be more realistic as to who was likely to benefit from a college education.
The trend towards having everybody going to college came from EEOC policy. A company used to be able to select smart applicants out of high school and put them on the management training track. But doing such would set them up for discrimination lawsuits if their testing process did not select a percentage of black applicants similar to the pool of black high school graduates. So companies started demanding college degrees (and with the current trend of colleges graduating people who really are not college material, now they'll start demanding Masters degrees).