Prisons keep people out of trouble, too!
Government run kiddie prisons ( misnamed "public schools") teach children to be comfortable with being prisoners of the state. They acclimate children to being subservient to government employees and government authority.
The student loan program makes college available to MANY students that couldn't otherwise afford to go to a quality school.
So?...How did the Greatest Generation and their parents manage to invent and build all that they did in the 20th century **without** any of these loan programs?
My father was an award winning top engineer for Exide. He died this year at the age of 96. He did **NOT** have a formal engineering degree. Yet,...He designed emergency lighting for WWII submarines and was the head engineer for Exide's part in some of the largest public energy projects ( one of them a nuclear power plant)in our state and surrounding states.
How did he get his training?
As was typical for men of his age, Exide trained him on the job, in classrooms at the plant, and they sent him to Drexel at night for courses the company felt were important. In return for this training, Exide had a vested interest in my dad. He had an excellent salary, generous benefits, and a very good pension. Exide did this because they didn't want to lose an employee they had spent so much time and effort to train.
As rabscuttle385 pointed out, its real **knowledge** that counts. There are far more efficient ways to acquire knowledge and to certify that knowledge than by attending college. Charles Murray is right. We should move away from using colleges as a means of issuing degrees, and move instead to private certifying exams.
Finally, it is to our country's advantage to **efficiently** teach our nation's kids, and get them out into the workplace creating wealth and health for the world to enjoy. We should NOT adopt the European model where our young adults languish in college into their thirties. While sitting in these halls of ivy, these overly big 30 year old adolescents are not adding anything to the GDP.
By the way, my homeschoolers entered college at the ages of 13, 12, and 13. Two had B.S. degrees in math at the age of 18. One had a masters in math at the age of 20. In her masters program, my daughter was **teaching** college level math courses at the age of **18**!!! If certifying exams had been available ( instead of degrees) they could have been certified in mathematics at even earlier ages.
You're a regular Horace Mann. You should be writing a child raising "how to", rather than wasting your time on political chat boards.
Have you looked into any online college degrees?
I believe that, by the time we need them, they’ll either be widely available,
or homeschooling will have to go underground because it’s illegal.