We first have to undo decades of treating trades as a lesser class of work, and telling everyone they have to go to college and "follow their passion".
Also, _not_ all public universities are free.
The only real problem with the student loans is that they gave them to people without concrete earning potential. They should have only gave out loans to educate people at real institutions (not U. of Phoenix eg) in practical areas like engineering or science. Instead, they gave a lot of loans to people who wouldn't have good employable potential post graduation.
That’s debatable. Regardless, college involves some education, for some. There is also a lot of partying, drug use, indoctrination, and impractical pursuits. I don’t want to fund that with public dollars, especially since our college graduation rights are already on the higher side relative to our competitor countries. If we were talking about spending public dollars on commuter trade schools, I’d feel more positively.
I'd be ok with that. If you want a humanities degree, then you have to pay. Maybe those still have student loans, but not big ones.
Our politics would never allow dual tracking. (There are many things that Europe does fine, such as public education, and transit, that Europe does just fine, but which we can’t do as well because of cultural differences.)
Good degrees: medical (nursing, nutrition, etc), computer science, most engineering degrees, math.
Bad degrees: most of the liberal arts degrees. English, theatre, journalism etc.
These are broad generalizations, obviously. There are people with "bad" degrees who make a good living. There are people with "good" degrees who are struggling. But when I see people complaining that they have huge amounts of debt and are unemployed or underemployed, it's almost universally people who have the degrees I labeled bad.
Some of the issue seems to be just a general lack of planning - they decide to pursue a degree in X, but don't really have a plan for what kind of job they want. Some of the issue seems to be a stubbornness to accept that maybe the thing they got a degree in (often their "passion" - a concept that needs to die) may not be the thing they build a career on. Someone who got a degree in theatre because they really loved being in plays in high school, for example (an actual example I saw recently in a Humans of New York post). They probably need to accept that theatre is a hobby (at least for them), and pursue a career in something else.
An actual example from someone I know who went through this process with her daughter: The daughter had decided she wanted to go to an out of state school and major in journalism, and then move to some specific city to work when she was done with school. Her mother sat her down and they ran the numbers on what the school would cost vs what her parents could help her with financially, what the average person with a journalism degree makes out of college, and what the cost of living was in the city she wanted to live in was. The numbers didn't add up. The college was expensive and would have left her with lots of debt, the journalism degree didn't leave her with very many choices in terms of careers, and the cost of living in the city she wanted to live in was pretty high. So, they talked it through and the daughter ended up doing two years of community college (much cheaper) before going to a less expensive in-state school, she got a degree in english (yes, I labeled it a bad degree - it's probably not in this case), and opted to live in a cheaper city once she'd graduated (she's still in college). This is the activity that's missing from most college-bound kids lives.
The problem today is that there are a lot of people who pursue degrees with little regard for the cost and the applicability of the degree they're pursuing. If they do that now, when they have some skin in the game, how will that improve if college is "free". I think you'll see more people getting degrees in fields that have no job market. Sure, they don't have debt (the rest of us will foot the bill), but they have no job prospects either.
The people I see on Facebook and other social media complaining about the cost of college and the job prospects they have all have one thing in common: they bought into the "pursue your passion" lie and came out of college with a degree that they can't use.
If taxpayers only agree to foot a much smaller bill, universities will be forced to cut all the frivolous stuff and get serious about education. I'm all for taxpayer-funded college but not at the prices these colleges charge at present. You don't see college football and all the other non-educational nonsense in Germany (using that because it's an example of a country with a free college system). "Free" college should pay only for classrooms and labs, professors and TAs - no dorms, meal plans, overpriced textbooks, sports or extra-curricular activities (unless paid for by students or donors), huge admin staff and the rest.
I saw something at one point that said that colleges now are luxurious compared to the colleges of 30/40/50 years ago. The implication there was that once students had easy access to student loans, state schools in particular no longer focused on being cost effective. Anecdotally, I live in a town with a state school (Illinois State), and the apartments that have sprung up on campus over the past 10-15 years are insane compared to what I saw in college. Flat screen TVs in every unit, pools, etc. This is probably the most extreme example, but there are many similar: https://thelodgeonwillow.com