If you look at how much these bootcamps charge (both in terms of tuition and income sharing), college is by far the cheaper option.

My ISA with lambda is for $30k USD that I started paying after I landed a job. There is no additional tuition. Program is less than a year. That's significantly cheaper than any of the universities I could have gone to.

The trade off, in my mind, is that I didn't become a SWE in lambda. Engineering is far more broad than learning how to build a CRUD app. Since Lambda, my self appointed curriculum has been engineering fundamentals, design patters/language/etc. Knowing how to write a BST is a lot different than understanding the core concepts behind everyday algos.

What? I paid less than 10K for my bootcamp. One semester of tuition at my shitty college cost more than that. The later didnt prepare me for a job.

> Federal government is backing almost all the student loans, but universities automatically increase their tuitions.

On the condition of getting the federal student loan is that the loan is exempts from bankruptcy. The loans follow us to the death or until it is paid off. It actively screws those naive students until to the point of no return. I have a friend who is still stuck paying the loan more than 15 years because the wage are not above the cost of living.

This is a huge legal binding part caused a lot of them instantly debts trap while the universities keep pushing the envelopes with the tuitions without oversight

Edit: But there are federal loan forgiveness programs. They have many of them. If your degree in your career and it end up into career ending situation, they have a program for this. However, I don't know if those program changed due to DeVos involved meddlings with various programs.

On the other hand, this sort of needs to exist on some level for two reasons:

1. If you go bankrupt, most stuff can be taken away if you can't pay for it. I can take your car, house, etc, but I can't take you education. You still have the full and complete value of that, so I'm not sure it's obvious that bankruptcy should remove the debt.

2. When you graduate, you typically haven't really got any money yet. It would be very easy for recent grads to just go bankrupt before they start accumulating wealth, and then go on with their lives without the loan debt.

The goal of bankruptcy laws is not to rob you blind, but to find a mutually acceptable way out of a bad situation. At least in the US, most bankruptcy is civil bankruptcy. There's no element of criminal justice at play. It's about what's practical, not what's fair.

It shouldn't need to be said, and yet it appears that it does, that bankruptcy is not without consequences for me, even if you fail to rob me blind in the process. A bankruptcy will limit my ability to rent an apartment, get a car loan, or win certain jobs. There is no story of people scamming bankruptcy in the US, not even in the recent past when educational debt was still dischargeable.

You should look up bankruptcy laws. They can probably take your house, but oftentimes debtors reaffirm their mortgage to avoid that scenario. You can keep one car used as transportation to and from work, and like 90% of your personal property unless you were already loaded. It really only forces you to sell off assets. You have to meet specific discretionary income to debt forumulae to apply, which locks a lot of people out of bankruptcy as an option.

Your second point is fair, though. That's why student debt shouldn't be a thing.