Re:Buyer's Remorse: High Debt and Low Pay Leave Some College...
by wpietri on Wednesday May 29, 2019 @10:45PM
(#20047908)
Two things can be true at once. In this case, it's true that people wanted to expand access to education. It's also true that, rather than just subsidizing education properly, this was seen as a more market-oriented approach.
I also don't think it's true that "giving students loans is cheaper than paying tuition directly". Governments are in a unique position to capture broad societal gains through taxation. So I think the cheaper option is just to fund education, especially the sorts we think increase economic productivity, and then tax the resulting income.
That was never the theory. The theory was that we decided we needed everyone to go to college. We realized that not everyone cold afford to go to college. Giving students loans is cheaper than paying tuition directly, because you'll get most of the money back, so the government flooded the market with no-credit-check student loans. Nobody involved was ever trying to create a functioning market, even an artificial market.