The education system used to work fairly well in this country several decades ago. You used to be able to go to college and pay for it in a very reasonable amount of time even through minimum wage jobs. Loans weren't even necessary. And when the end user pays the bills, the connection to cost is there so people pay attention to what it really costs because they bare the brunt of it right away and it's not hidden (so to speak) from them through loans that are paid off over 10-20 years.
It was only when the government decided that something was "wrong" and needed to be improved that the system started going to shit and getting ever more expensive and the product (education) getting worse and worse - the quality of the education people are paying for nowadays is abysmal half the time.
I discussed this recently in another thread with some specific numbers attached to my explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15647956
That is...a pretty remarkable claim. I think there are a fair number of people - lots of women, lots of people who grew up smart and poor, lots of non-white folks - who would contest that pretty stridently.
I'm referring purely to the quality of higher education for the price that was paid. Accounting for inflation, in real terms the price that was paid for college was a small fraction of what is being paid today. And anyone (who was not subject to artificial limitations on access) could pay for it in a very reasonable amount of time and not go into debt by working, as I showed in that link, ~250 hours a year at minimum wage to pay tuition - tuition assumed to be for one semester, not two - so double that to ~500 hours a year at minimum wage to pay for the whole cost of that year's tuition. That's extremely affordable and no one had to go into debt to do it. In fact my father did exactly this in the early 80's. He worked part time and went to school and had no debt upon graduating.
And that could be a decent second life for abandoned retail shopping malls, too.
It might also be nice for such an institution to adopt a libre-license or gratis-license policy for all course materials, such that textbooks and lecture notes are essentially sold for the printing and distribution costs, and electronic versions downloadable at no additional charge.
And since some of those new colleges will fail, establish a succession plan to begin with, so that the student records can be easily maintained and transferred.
Even if you cut established university costs to the bone, you still eventually run up against the problem that there isn't enough undergraduate instruction capacity in them to serve the growing demand for bachelor's degrees. You're going to need to build out anyway, and private universities aren't necessarily going to do enough of that if it drops the market price for tuition.
Yeah, but that's exactly why no one would ever lend that amount in the first place. That, I believe, was the OP's point. College should not cost what it does. And part of that reason is federal guarantees upon the debt. So colleges can raise the price and since the debt is guaranteed creditors are happy to lend. Essentially, there is no check and balance on the price of education that exists for pretty much everything else that might be financed (i.e. a car).
"IMO the only way to solve it is to put the school on the hook for part of the $$ if the default rate exceeds X%."
Totally disagree. That seems to violate every notion of contract law that exists. The colleges are not taking part in the loan process. They are not agreeing to take any monetary risk on the individual. They are simply offering a service at a (bloated) price. The debtor agrees to take on debt to pay for the service and the creditor agrees to take the risk. The college should not be brought into that totally separate contractual agreement. That's like holding an employer responsible for debts that an employee defaults upon because the employer had cutbacks and laid off the employee.