First and foremost. it shackles kids fresh out of college with a mountain of debt for a degree that may or not provide them with future earnings to pay off that debt. Student loans, in most cases, cannot be wiped out by a bankruptcy, and oo it never goes away. And most of all it delays the necesity to grow up and start making responsible decisions. Often kids the US now go to college and rather than get a job and work their way through college, they take oout student loans to fund their lives and give themselves that "college experience."

Outside of about 10 Universities (Stanford, the Iyy League, Cal Tech, MIT) It doesn't matters far more what you get your degree in, rather than where you attend. There are exceptions to this, of course. Schools that have a top program like BYU's accounting porogram offer a large benefit because of the prestige of the single program. But, generally speaking, getting a liberal arts degree from a state school is no different than getting that same degree from some small liberal arts college that charges 40k per year.

Whether they are for profit, or non profit universities, those schools lie or inflate their post grad placement and income numbers, because they all have a financial incentive to do so.

Second, the ease to which kids can get finacial aid, especially federally subsidized student loans has directly lead to the inflation of costs at the Universities. The cost of attending college has outpaced inflation for the past 25 years. And that cost has not gone to hiring more instructors and expanding enrollment, but rather it has gone to administrative costs. One little anecdote on this. I graduated from CSU-Fullerton in 2000. While the cost of attending that school was astronomically low, one thing they made me do was do what was called a grad check. It cost me $100 dollars and some administrator reviewed my transcript and approved me for graduation. This HAD to be done before I was awarded my degree. WHY??? I had indeed paid thousands in tuition, fees and parking over the two years I went there (I did two years at a CC) and i still had to pay this stupid administrative fee. And I am sure they had bureaucrats whose job was to process these grad checks.

3rd it encourages kids to get degrees in completely worthless areas. Subsidising such loans means kids can shuffle off to the future the idea of what they plan on doing when the graduate. With all due respect, A person is welcome to get a degree in American Studies, but they do not have the rigth to complain, when they finish college and have very few prospects for employment.

Why then should the rest of the country pay for so many people's bad decisions.

YOu want to fix this problem??? Privatize all student loans. Let kids try and get a student loan for a BA in philosophy. If it is private banks doing it and interest starts accumulating immediatly, fewere kids will waste their time in university earning unmarketable worthless degrees. Then maby these schools will cut the fat out of heir administrations, and spend money on actually educating students, not on a Dean of Student Diversity who gets more than 100K per year, yet does nothing to actually educate those students.

Is it possible to get though school without or very little debt, doing it on one's own? Yes. My step son has a PhD and finished without a cent of debt and did not get help from his mom. My daughter graduated from BYU and took out a single student loan her jr year, that she plans on paying of n th enext two. The payment is going to be something like $67 per month. Her route? One year of CC pre mission, fully paid for because she had a high GPA in high school. Destpite a 3.9 College GPA she was rejected by BYU. So, she went to LDS BC for one semester post mission, got a 4.0, re-applied and got in to BYU. I only helped her withi her LDSBC tuition the first semester because she had just returned from her mission. After that, the only thing I provided for her was paying her car insurance and her cell phone. Other than that she paid her own way. She worked part time, got one loan, and then was old enough to qualify for Pell Grants her senior year. She is finishing one last class this spring and then will start looking for an entry level job. Becasue she has so little debt, she has far more flexibility in what her starting wage will be.