Specifically, the government made it so college loans can't be discharged in bankruptcy, and backs many student loans.
The solution is to remove the exception for student debt in bankruptcy, and either have the government stop backing student loans, or make stricter requirements for colleges to quailify for its students qualifying for federal loans. Like say, require that a certain percentage of students graduate, and get jobs within a year of graduating, having reasonable tuition, etc.
Loans will only be granted to students who have a track record of high achievement, parents willing to co-sign, and going into majors that make economic sense.
Enrollment will drop, universities will stop offering passion majors, mass layoffs in library science, academia, and college administrations (likely to the tune of 1M+ people).
In the end, students will be told by federal examination which school and major they get to pursue, or whether they get to go to college at all.
That's assuming the government is both effective and efficient in this process.
This is essentially how most consumer economics work.
And for that matter, I think it could make since to have trade schools for white colllar jobs too. In some sense that is what coding camps are, although I'd like to see them be a little more rigorous and include things like security, software design, algorithms, etc.
As for passion subjects and arts, maybe have more, and higher quality community classes available that people can go to when they already have a decent job and can pay for them outright instead of accruing massive debt.
They are young. And therefore there is an asymmetry in information.
The answers lie in educating them to make good decisions, and be there to help when good decisions happen to turn out poorly. The current dilemma is largely due to provably bad decisions (by students, banks, universities, government).
Are student loans the most pressing "bad decision" we have as a society? Definitely not. Is it a very electable topic? Yep
First, no, we have some high-visibility examples of dictators claiming to be socialists, several of whom had purges of other internal opponents who said socialism was a different thing to what they were doing.
We don't point to the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea"* or "The Democratic Republic of Congo" then say of Democracy (or of republics) "And we know how it always ends".
Second, there's a huge gap between what the USA considers "dangerously lefty" and what is seen in northern Europe today, let alone states today which are or were explicitly socialist such as the USSR.
* AKA North Korea, AKA Naughty Korea
Also, modern day India has a very strong government intervention bias, especially regarding lifting people out of poverty. Be it investments in infrastructure (such as running water), or downright giving food to people. Good luck explaining how that isn't "socialism" to an American.
You mean Kerala, not Karnataka.
And conversely, West Bengal was ruled by the Communists since the 1970s to the early 2010s, yet it's developmental indicators have regressed to those comparable to some of the poorest states of India.
Conversely, right leaning and nativist Himachal Pradesh (if you ain't Pahadi or Pahadi-adjacent we will give you the cold shoulder, and both the state chapters of the HP INC and BJP trace their origins to the RSS and Arya Samaj) has developmental indicators that can match Kerala and other traditionally richer states in India.
At the end of the day, all that matters is administrative capacity, not ideology.
If local government is held accountable, it will work hard to deliver.
I moved from the UK to Germany, I actively decided against the USA. Why? Consider what was going on politically in the US right after the UK voted for Brexit.
Σκεφτόμουν την Κύπρο, αλλά οι Άγγλοι λένε όταν κάτι είναι δύσκολο να διαβαστεί: "It's all greek to me"
Are you sure you know what you're talking about?
Reducing to "is" or "isn't" doesn't help understand the problem or come up with viable solutions.
For God's sake, it will even kill custom software development which most people sitting here, do for a living - because it is the same exact thing - vast majority of clients never get what they want and even if they did they won't be able to make the money on the useless "products" they invented, because this is nothing but a systematic delusion that's moving them. Almost all of them see themselves as genius inventors of the next world-changing thing but they are in fact random nobodies who raised cash from other random nobodies, to waste it on something that makes their contractors laugh so badly they even refrain from doing video calls. It's even worse than higher education. I seen multiple software dev companies throwing lavish parties on the April Fool's day as "professional holiday of our clients".
Should we first look at ourselves in the mirror before blaming the college cabal for doing the same as we do ourselves, just more successfully?
You seem to have doubled down on the is/isn't perspective and demonstrated what I was referring to. The more you reduce the less useful your reasoning becomes.
The attitude that the government shouldn't intervene against companies on the behalf of human rights has been tried for fifty years, and it is an unprecedented failure even in financial terms for at least roughly 80% of the population of one of the largest and wealthiest countries in the world in terms of real purchasing power. Even for many of us in higher income brackets, the resulting crumbling infrastructure and drastic wealth disparities leave much to be desired as a society to live in. Many of these problems have solutions, and calling them "socialism" is meaningless as an argument against them
With a place in the top 10 happiest countries? https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...
Let the market forces decide. Eventually people will realise college doesn't work and will stop going there. Seriously problem is that too many people think they are smart and can benefit from a degree, when most can't. If 10% top graders go to college from school as it was in the boomers' era, ROI of higher education will be enormous (as there won't be an oversupply of useless graduates), and costs will be low (as low demand always reduces prices).
We shouldn't punish people who take the money because people are willing to pay it. Who's fault it is that they are dumb? Do we see much say, annoying advertisement to the tune of "go study X with us, you'll be rich and women will love you"? No. People are doing it because they are dumb. If we try to build a system that prevents smart people from taking money put on the table by dumb people, we will make the whole system dumber by incentivising dumbness.