We should tell high school students that they will not receive federal loans. You will see tuition rate drop everywhere. Some universities will be forced to close. But you have to cut off the fat.
Colleges have been in trouble since the draft ended in the 1970s; the student loan program helped young people attend college to avoid the draft/Vietnam War, and when the draft ended those “fake students” dried up. Schools that had expanded to deal with the draft windfall faced a reckoning, so the program continued to lend money to students even if the degrees peddled were worthless (and the loans therefore couldn’t be managed by the borrowers). Foreign students made up part of the shortfall, but COVID put an end to that for a time.
Higher education in the US is becoming the same farce as public elementary and high schools, with the same meaningless inflated grades, wasteful spending, and uneducated graduates.