[bgill]

There used to be (probably still are) government programs that teach a trade, pay for campus dorms and give you 40 hours/wk min wage.

In CA, there’s all sorts of tv shows like Master Chef or Chopped or Best Baker she could have signed up for. Or get a couple of her equally unemployed culinary school friends and go on Food Truck Race. She could have applied for a job at a legitimate restaurant and worked her way up rather than scooping ice cream at the mall. If she were any sort of self starter, which she’s proven she isn’t but I’ll play along, she could have used that $100k to open her own restaurant.

[Vigilanteman]

If she were any sort of self starter . . . she could have used that $100k to open her own restaurant.

The root cause of the problem is that nobody would loan her $100K to open a restaurant, but it is easy to get in that kind of debt with guaranteed government loans.

Fedzilla need to be driven out of the student loan buiness and have their virtual monopoly on said business broken up and sold.

There are already two (perhaps more) replacement models successfully in place:

1. The North Dakota model. North Dakota has a state owned bank which makes student loans for all the post high school educational loans in the state. Their default rate is near zero. The reason it is near zero is because it charges low rates for a marketable field of study and high rates for less marketable fields of study. It also limits the loan amounts based on the field, a higher amount for students making progress in a marketable degree. Lower amounts and low ceilings for students making slow process in less marketable degrees. Guess where most of the very few defaults occur?

2. The Hillsdale College model. I've heard Grove City and some of the more conservative colleges are doing something similar. Hillsdale has their own group of approved lenders lined up. Again, their default rate is negligible because most of their students are expected to work and are highly marketable when they graduate. There is no reason that other institutions of higher learning can't do the same thing.

There you have it-- two successful models, both a state based solution and a private institution based solution. There are undoubtedly other variations on the same themes. BREAK UP THE FEDZILLA MONOPOLY AND GET THEM OUT OF THE BUSINESS!