How to fix it?
Garnish their wages.
Every simple non-problem can seem like a problem if you are so droolingly stupid as to discount the obvious.
Eliminate worthless academic departments and the cereal box top majors eminating from that cess pool.
Fix it by ending the doomsday debt machine known as the Federal Reserve.
it supports the US Government in everyone of its progressive social-engineering schemes.
But if you make relatively little and saved nothing, you get all sorts of grants, scholarships, and subsidized loans.
One of the biggest problems I have with the EFC is that it does not take into account your younger children, or children that have already graduated college.
Most people I have spoken to are in the same boat as me. The EFC comes out to $55,000 per year. We all compare EFC's and we are all get the same number.
We got an offer letter for my daughter (now a junior in college) when she was accepted, and I went back to the college and asked if they could do any better. The answer was "no"... their offer (around $30K/year) was already below my EFC so they couldn't do anything.
Then again, let's not...those who have read Atlas Shrugged knows how these "unification plans" didn't work out...lol.
Harvard could give 50,000 students an annual $20,000 stipend on the income from their $30+ billion endowment.
Formally open up the bankruptcy process to student loan holders.
There is ample precedent. That’s how it will be solved. Discharge unpayable debt, or restructure it.
This will destroy academia as we know it, but that is inevitable anyway.
No American should be expected to be enslaved for life by unpayable debt. Like it or not, that’s the only solution.
Simple.
One student at a time.
If you can’t afford it CASH, don’t sign up.
So long as prospective students are willing to commit to whatever hair-brained schemes to pay for whatever the list price is, schools will keep jacking up those prices.
One reason for raising tuition to the stratosphere (other than they’re just happy to accept whatever you’re willing to pay) is to create _friction_: there simply isn’t enough seats available for everyone who allegedly* wants a degree, and they can’t discriminate on any other grounds, so they have to raise prices until demand finally drops off to match available supply.
(* - as a part-time prof, I found fully 1/3rd of students either wouldn’t or couldn’t do the work; if you won’t do the work, you don’t want the degree - go home and save your money.)
Here’s what I would recommend for students.
1) Select an affordable university.
2) Live at home and commute to school.
3) Work part time jobs to cover expenses such as food, tuition, and textbooks.
4) Keep borrowing to a minimum.
I know this works. It’s what I did to get through college.
When an in debt college student, present or past, gets into the voting booth, issues like the economy, immigration , fundamental Muslim Jihad, race relations,Supreme Court Justice appointments etc will be trumped once again by this simple consideration:
Vote for the Socialists (dems) because they will get the taxpayers to pay off your college debt, because if you vote for Republicans, you will be in debt for the rest of your life. - Tom
Now, the university uses OPM, yours, to fund their lifestyle, with no limits.
It has become a laundering service, with your money, from the taxes, through govt officials, and back into their campaign coffers.
Slick plan, that.
What bugs me is we’re constantly bombarded, especially by Obama and his ilk is you HAVE to have a secondary education... of course, part of it (mostly) is to indoctrinate and brainwash our youth, but we don’t HAVE to go to secondary school. Trade school is the best if you have to. We really need to cut these university monstrosities down to size.
No, there is no need to lend money through colleges, either.
We need to allow the Internet revolution to find its equilibrium in delivering far more efficient college education. Those who can afford a 5-6 year undergraduate holiday are welcome to purchase it. Those schools that want to give such a holiday to high-potential or other students are also so welcome. But the idea that we taxpayers ought to fund such concentrated waste and frivolity of others is beyond decency.