> Maybe for a doctor, sure - but for teachers who are going to come out making 30k - it seems that education prices should be tied to future earning potential somehow.

The real problem is that people are completely price insensitive when it comes to their education. I would prefer us to move to an equity model, personally. One where education is free, but the university takes a small cut of your future earnings. This way everyone's incentives are properly aligned.

And for efficiencies sake we could centralise the collection of that cut. We could call it "taxes" (snark aside, this is why public education works. If you need to have a free market system, then have well regulated collection agencies compete for the attention of universities who's only allowed source of funding will be this cut, with some additional bonus paid out by the state for social mobility. One measure of this could be the increase in salary vs expected salary based on socioeconomic class)

We had this system in Sweden for a long time, my parents were able to study with these terms in the 90s. Basically, you could choose between multiple payment plans, one of them being that the government takes 4% of your income (after taxes) no matter the size. Once you're 65, your debt is written off no matter how much is left.

The system was changed by the more fiscally conservative government of the 00s into the terms I got, which is a payment plan over 25 years. If you can't pay you can apply for an exemption, but the interest rate is still compounding during the exemption. The loan has to be repaid before you're 60.

The reasons given for the change were many, but the most cited are that income earned overseas (very common, this being the EU and all) is very hard to keep track of and that this system incentivizes us into choosing a degree resulting in a high paying job.

(I should ad that we do not pay tuition for universities in Sweden, the student loans are almost exclusively used for living expenses so that you can study full time and some of it is used for textbooks and other supplies)

> The real problem is that people are completely price insensitive when it comes to their education.

While some people are, there are plenty of people who are not insensitive. I went to a public state school and pretty much everyone i knew there chose that school because it was way cheaper than going out of state/private and some of them even got scholarships.

I wonder what an equity system would end up doing to the way compensation works. I would imagine “perk” and other non-salary forms of compensation would increase, and other forms of Hollywood Accounting style tricks would be common. Maybe not though, since the IRS already has legal frameworks in place to ensure income is able to be accounted for.

Surely, just cancelling debt will always increase cost of service (I cannot come up with a historical example where this is not the case, but happy to be corrected).

However, this gesture is not a policy, and just a really nice gift and expression of altruism.

Also... since you mentioned it, I cannot believe how little teachers are making, including their pension guarantees (in US and many other countries) -- for the effort that many of them put in -- this is just a disgrace.

I wish, there would be a way for exchange safety/tenure guarantees for significant pay increase (eg at least double). And let the teachers make that choice.