There's an awful lot of students that held no job during college, and instead relied 100% on student loans to buy Taco Bell, pay rent, and put gas in the car.

The huge numbers you see tossed around almost always include living expenses. "$120k for a state school!" sort of thing.

The failure in reporting is those living expenses would have been incurred regardless if the person attended university or not.

As a society, I think we need to encourage people to work at least part time, if not full time during university - and take a slower path toward their degree. The result will be more experienced, mature graduates that have had time to evaluate their future.

While I agree that the high numbers are often because people are ill informed or even irresponsible about the loan, I don't think dragging out schooling is the best answer either, especially if you have higher earning power once you get a degree.

Also keep in mind the current system incentives - aid is inversely correlated with income and balances are forgiven in some cases. Why work harder if it means getting a worse deal? If one really wants it for "free" then there's always the military route.

In my experience, most recent college graduates are effectively useless anyway. I say that as a once-recent graduate.

It's often thought, incorrectly, that university teaches you how to do a certain job. People go to university to learn how to become an X.

University isn't supposed to teach you how to do a job... it's supposed to teach you how to think critically. Along the way you learn, in varying depth, knowledge about specific fields of study, but that's not the same as learning a job.

Recent graduates are often immature (barely 21, who can blame them), limited in both depth and breadth of knowledge, and inexperienced. Most new hires have to be trained within industry for at least several months if not longer before they become productive for any business/organization.

Having students work part time, or preferably full time jobs while attending university would be a net gain for all of the above.

Working a job teaches teamwork and responsibility. Employees gain life experience, learn skills (learning a skill is the point, not what the skill is), discipline, and how to interact with others professionally and maturely. Basically everything university is not capable of teaching.

Working a job is complementary to an education, under this idea. The notion that university should be completed in four years needs to change - maybe it should take 6-8 years after all. The quality of an average graduate would be immense, and future earning abilities would be equally increased.

The issues you describe could be addressed in other ways. Your claim about college teaching critical thinking is misguided. While it's true that is the theoretical goal, in practice they're mostly just cranking out degrees and requiring a lot of memorization.

"maybe it should take 6-8 years after all."

This has multiple negative economic effects, such as delaying family and decreasing g retirement savings compounding.

"The quality of an average graduate would be immense, and future earning abilities would be equally increased."

I highly doubt this. Without the qualifications to work in their field, they would likely have limited benefit. If they are able to work in their field without the knowledge gained in college, then we should do away with that requirement and move to apprenticeships.

America has affordable higher education; state schools and community colleges are generally very affordable. The problem is when naive highschool students get lured into taking on huge amounts of debt by expensive private schools that have no intention of teaching undergrads well, but nevertheless assert that pretense to lure in more suckers.

And when they want to live away from home.

The living arrangements are getting more expensive. My college tore down their old, low cost dorms. They replaced them with suites that cost twice as much.