Student debt crisis

The Fiscal Times suggests one approach to reducing student loan defaults; making it a public rather than privately funded matter.  Somewhat typical - reminiscent of liberal solutions to "gun violence" - forget the violence, just take away the guns.

In this case, forget the fact that this debt largely emanates from people getting degrees that they should not have.  Consider this:  We have created a system where the bachelor's degree is the new high school diploma, where everyone, capable or not, is expected to go to college after high school.  Problem is that college is expensive - even more so with the proliferation of private universities who are in it for profit and subsist on the financial aid debt that is piled on their students.  An undergraduate degree has become no more than a box to check on the way to a job that cannot pay enough to support paying back the loans. We have seemingly incompatible positions here:  everyone deserves to go to college (whether it and they are functional or not), but they need to go into debt to do so.  This is even more true when one considers the fact that many of those attending the most expensive schools are doing so because they could not qualify to attend public universities.  I know - I teach and have taught at both and while the quality of the students in both has decreased over time (again due to the fact that "everyone" is supposed to go to college), the private institution consistently draws students who, on average, would not have been accepted into a public university.  I should also note that, as competition from private schools has increased, state-run public universities have become less a place for training and learning and more a place where the bottom-line is most important.

As long as universities, great and small, public and private, are measured by their cash reserves, their students are going to emerge with more and more debt while being less and less useful to the job market.  This is not a matter of funding sources, it is a failure of culture.