Good!

Let education be paid for by grants and the student own income, most grants. Plus force the universities to make their tuition cost effective.

Edit: However many years ago, public universities charged a fairly nominal tuition and survived for many doing that (financed by their respective US states). These public universities today have massively expanded their costs, primarily based on capital spending and follow the model of private universities.

While I attended college, tuition costs almost doubled, but since haven't increased much per year. It wasn't massive increased spending, it was the state cutting off basically all finding. There's certainly fat to be cut, but the admin costs are mostly imposed on high.

I know people who would GLADLY throw away two years of their life in bankruptcy proceedings if it means they could be free of their crushing student debt.

Some enterprising law students figuring out they could get a loan to learn how to get out of the loan - and end up with a very valuable degree out of it that could not be repossessed - and by the time they needed good credit, it would be off their records.

It took awhile for word to get out, and then they banned getting out of student loans.

So blame the lawyer (students) I guess?

Harvard in particular is so wealthy it always charges tuition based on ability to pay. The poor who go to Harvard pay nothing. But, of course, the poor seldom go to Harvard because they aren't admitted.

Just saying. There are mid-range school where, all else being equal, your scenario might be true. But those school depend on those same lower income students and, well, I'd be in favor of them buckling and charging less.

If underprivileged kids represent anything above about 5% at Ivy's I would be shocked. One stat from Boston Globe was that only 3% of Harvard comes from the US bottom 20% economically.

The Ivys do more to perpetuate the existing power dynamic than they do to raise anyone up. They are far too small and far too nepotistic to do otherwise.

If you want to raise the middle/bottom up, you need to look at the large state university systems which are orders of magnitude larger.

Also there are lots and lots of programs state and private to fund low income higher Ed. It is not a dichotomy.

Good. When I got my degree, almost nobody had student loans. The kids from lower middle income and below tried for scholarships, Pell grants, and even had jobs that slowed them down due to fewer hours available for school. Tuition was a tiny fraction of what it is today. Oh, and a couple years taking transferable courses at community college was a thing too.

If you want to help the poor, then do that but dont corrupt the system the way it has been the last 25 years. Now everyone is screwed.

I went to a good university, majored in history, took out 100k in debt totally for said degree, and have been working as a programmer ever since.

Why does my outcome feel so rare? I think 100k was a fair enough price. (25k per year including food and a room).

Every professor or co-professor I know gets paid peanuts, gets poor support, and gets waaaay too many students. These folks are at Yale, Princeton, etc. It’s a scam and the money disappears into the machine with little accountability and a ton of hand waving.

My tuition was around $15,000 per year. You are more than welcome to investigate where that disappears to (presumably not all to staff salary), but requiring me to pay $100,000 upfront would have killed my career before it ever started-- unless of course you convince employers that a degree isn't needed.

$15k for tuition alone (not counting books/materials/food, room and board) obviously makes that impossible.

It isn’t going into teaching staff. It goes into administrators salaries, bloated programs/overhead in sports, recruiting program costs, fees for housing, fees for food, and ever larger endowments that somehow never trickle down - among other things.

For what is being taught 99% of the time, the economies of scale make $2500/yr for tuition perfectly doable in a typical undergrad environment - if anyone wanted to. And it is done all the time in Europe, for instance.

If you’re taking out a loan to cover all your living costs + tuition than obviously that is going to be more expensive than tuition alone. In Europe where school tuition is covered, there are also separate programs to cover student living costs - which are also not super high generally. My ex-gf got her physics degree from a well known university in Spain, and they paid her $500 per month or week (forget) to cover living costs at the time I believe which was more than enough.

She wasn’t eating imported caviar, but students in general have always been able to get by (and have fun/a social life) without big expenses.

Then few students would want to stay poor for ten years just to get rid of loans. But lenders would also have incentive to not back very poor career paths.

Which would cause significant negative price pressure on that education.

Meanwhile, really useful classes that students wanted and professors wanted to teach didn't exist, because the school wouldn't fund the extra class time.

In short, out of all the school's top priorities, the students were nowhere to be found. Change that, and maybe I'll change my mind too.