Here's a solution. Discharge student loan debt and directly fund public university budgets to cover tuition.

That's a terrible solution that doesn't fix any of the real problems. It just shifts around the financial burden of an increasingly eroded and expensive education system.

Here's a solution: Make sure that everyone who cannot cut it in college does not go in the first place. Start by not letting people who cannot complete basic requirements graduate from high school.

This starts to turn off the money tap, instead of turning it on full blast by hooking it up to even more public funds, so it will never happen. It also prevents lots of people who can barely read from taking on debt only to drop out 2 years later after doing a few "remedial" years.

https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/higher-education-erodes-a7c...

Then, make college more difficult until the credentialism becomes less pointless. It is insane that we have baristas 100k in debt after being in school from age 5 to 22. There are more ways to solve that than just redirecting the debt.

Yeah, and who you should vote for to get it done? Sorry to remind it, but US had 8 years of democratic president (and mostly democratic congress) and student debt exploded in size during the same time period. So, millenials voting for Obama were wrong? Who they should have voted instead?

> So, millenials voting for Obama were wrong?

Hi, unfortunately, yes. I, like many others, wrote to him [and a few notable Democrat and Republican Senators who publicly champion(ed)] SL reform. My letter actually had supporting facts, and practical actionable policy suggestions. I heard back (directly) only from one Senator, a Republican, whose form letter was unrelated to SLs.

Though I didn't receive a direct response from anyone in Obama's administration, shortly after I'd sent my letter, the administration suggested cutting the SL interest deduction, which was polar opposite of what I'd suggested. And as you probably know, during last year's tax reform debates, the Republicans picked up, but ultimately dropped, that very same idea of removing said deduction.

There were some other policy changes that I saw effected after my letter that makes me certain that it was read and understood. Unfortunately, those changes, harmful to borrowers, were again the opposite of what I'd suggested.

Given what I am reading in Ron Suskind's Confidence Men, and have read/heard elsewhere, I'm not all that surprised.[1]

Young people will continue to be politically and financially expendable until they learn from history, organize themselves into strong blocks and directly involve themselves in the political process. Voting is merely a small part of participation. And I say that having been on the inside of the political machine.

[1] http://ronsuskind.com/books/confidence-men/

Part of the problem here is that we don't have a very good range of views represented in our political parties. The Republicans actually have a pretty diverse mix of traditional conservatives, neoconservatives and libertarians. The Democrats, on the other hand, are almost pathologically centrist. The most popular politician in America is a left-wing Democrat who supports free public universities and halving student loan interest rates, but rather than trying to cultivate that popularity, the Democratic Party can barely mask its contempt for him. So if those are the sorts of causes you support, you really will have a hard time finding good candidates to vote for, but your best bet is probably to vote in Democratic primaries and try to push them a bit left.

Why would you think voting for a single solitary politician would solve it all?

Alternatively: shut down all the scam universities and programs, sieze and auction off their holdings to pay off student loan debt.