She's paid 20k as a waitress. The article doesn't say what's her major or what job it was supposed to lead to.

>She's paid 20k as a waitress

no?

>When I finally got my first full-time office job at the start of 2013, it paid less than $20,000 a year

> She was paying ~$70k for a degree whose first job paid less than $20k/yr.

I'd say that is the problem in the US education system as well. US colleges and universities are ridiculously expensive and getting more and more expensive every year. And there's no reasonable explanation, why.

Because students can get the loans and they don't look at the price "because all education is good". It honestly is that simple.

Yep. The same thing happened in the UK - the cost is capped by the government, but the limit was increased from about 3k to 11k/year, with the government arguing that there will be competition between universities and only the best ones will charge maximum.

But it never worked like this - there are literally zero downsides to charging maximum amount, so every university does it - and the students don't care because they are guaranteed a loan by the Student Loan Company anyway, and none of the students I've interacted with ever asked themselves "is this degree worth about £50k once I'm done" - they just want to go to uni, the cost is just a magical number no one looks at. The only good thing about the UK system is that the loan repayment is means based and if you don't make more than ~£22k/year you don't pay anything, and if you do you only pay 10% of your salary above 22k towards your student loan(so the more money you make the faster it will be paid off). If the loan is not paid off in 40 years it's automatically forgiven.

But from my point of view - it's completely nuts either way. Higher education should be completely free to the student, no matter where or what they study.

Maybe not completely free (to deter people from sticking around for 10+ years), but at least semi free. Probably below 1k a year. If you add living costs to that, anyone who takes up a part time student job should be able to sustain themselves and graduate without debt.

Any system that forces someone to graduate with significant amounts of student debt, is in my view, bad. It's not really going to benefit society, unless your view of society is modern slavery and chaining people as a slave to their debts.

Mind: that doesn't mean that certain schools aren't worth the tuition (Stanford, Columbia, Oxford, Cambridge, etc). But part of the "value offering" comes from the network you build up there.

That all said, while university can be a good part of your development as an adult, maybe more people will eventually realise it's not necessarily the best option anymore.

The writer of this article might have gotten a similar "education" (perhaps not in the formal sense -- but on an intellectual level) had she gone and lived abroad in a new environment doing something useful for a few years when she was in her late teens / early 20s. But it's a very personal situation that very much depends on the individual.