The only losers here would be the colleges that no longer get to charge the same $300k for every degree they stamp.
Where is my logic wrong?
If you artificially change the price of degrees to match the expected lifetime ROI of that degree, you are decreasing the barrier to jobs that we already have too many people attempting to do and increasing the barrier to jobs we need more people to do.
Of course this analysis overlooks that some jobs are "good for society" on some metric, but no one wants to pay for them. But then the approach should be to directly incentivize those jobs eg through grants or government-funded work programs.
Of course, that's assuming that the cost of lost tuition on cheapo degrees is made up by bumping up the cost of good job degrees. If you merely cut the tuition of some without raising the rest, then you will need to deal with all the school's who have wildly outsized budgets that were being subsidized by the cheapo degrees.
Or, the government will end up paying for it, and there'll be a glut of social worker degrees flipping burgers because social work and library sciences have a relatively fixed number of positions available.
Not everyone is cut out for a STEM career. You can't turn cavemen into electrical engineers if the aptitude isn't there, right?
It's not a big leap to say that some people will prioritize greed over compatibility and end up risking being able to cheat their way through or flunking out / being expelled if they fail with nothing but either a degree they aren't qualified to possess or a debt they aren't able to repay.
A lot of people in IT would be happier as truck drivers, a lot of engineers would be happier as welders. It always boils down to balancing the money with the passion, and the current system is balanced to the college's coffers.
I did preface my original statement by saying that I don't know if there is a good solution. I proffered a solution knowing that it wasn't a good solution because there are things I with my single brain simply am not capable of calculating for, but I believe we can all agree that the current system has some significant flaws that should be addressed, right?
Free tuition.
Germany has had zero tuition university for quite some time. And though they allowed charging tuition again a while ago, it was capped at something like 600EUR (?) per semester. Many universities apparently also went back to not charging tuition again.
It works well enough if you ask me. I got a great education with zero student debt. Was it Harvard? No. Was it a great education? Absolutely. Masters degree. I have a good job and of the people in my study group more than one is working at Tesla, Facebook and Google. More than one of them also have a PhD.
The very concept of student loans is mind-boggling for them.
I only know how it works in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, but students loans are super common there. Even though tuition is free you still have food, rent, books and other living expenses that all have to be paid for. How do most German students pay those costs?
"Bundesausbildungsförderungsgesetz" which is just the name of the law but shortened to "BAföG" to refer to the loan itself. You "apply for BAföG".
However this is a loan directly from the government and its meant to pay for housing and food and such. If you get it you also get priority in student housing for example. Of course there is still not enough student housing in most universities and that means if you don't get BAföG you have to sort out paying for housing yourself and getting it on the open market and even if you do get BAföG you might still need to. So in most university cities there's also a lot of cheaper housing geared towards students and living together ("Wohngemeinschaft").
There's an eternal debate over how much BAföG is enough and who should get how much. It's tied to your parents' income basically (unless you worked before, which basically would mostly apply to people that did an "Ausbildung" i.e. were in the vocational system before and have had their own income but now want to go to university.
You have a certain period after leaving university to pay it back and if you pay it back in one shot (or maybe a few larger payments IIRC) then you have to pay back less.
In 2012, 24% of all students in Germany received financial support via BAföG
It's a lot easier to stomach covering a grand a month (shared housing, student works for spending money) by comparison.
Maybe a social work degree has positive externalities that far exceed the earnings. But there's also a lot of crap that doesn't, and incentivizing the landslide of crap and disincentivizing the skills that are in shortage will do a lot of damage.
Stuff that pays well tends to be stuff that's actually valued by society. Structural engineers and surgeons get paid lots of money because they actually value add and their skills are in short supply.
The happy path might be the same or better, but the sad path gets grimmer. All that said, the completion rate fiasco is it's whole own can of worms.