The cost of student loans is nothing compared to the value that those degree holders will provide. In my opinion, your first degree at a public university or community college should be paid for by the Federal government as long as you keep a certain grade average, and stick to a reasonable timeline.

If it matters to anyone, I paid off my loans entirely, but also received Pell grants.

If your opinion were correct the degrees would pay for themselves and we wouldn't be having these discussions. We have people paying $160k a year to study in fields that are increasingly having their fundamental research completely debunked and exposed as fraudulent (see Political Science and Pyschology).

There is also absolutely 0 reason these degrees should cost so much. If we want to keep a guaranteed student loan program it should be restricted in the amount that can be borrowed and it should only be usable at local community colleges that cost under $5k a year. Nothing about education necessitates spending more than that.

The degrees do pay for themselves on average. Bachelor's degreeholders have median earnings $525/week higher than high school graduates (https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2022/data-on-display/educa...), which over the course of a career would cover even the most egregious student debt loads. That's precisely why it's a hard problem; we could just warn kids not to jump into the debt trap if it weren't genuinely worth the cost.

I heard an interesting fact a couple of days ago,

The median student that graduated from college starting in 2009 had more debt than what they started with after 12 years and it's only gotten worse.

So your belief that it will cover the most egregious is not true for the median student. Given that, I'm also interested in how those lifetime earnings increases are distributed across degrees.

This kind of "fact" always raises alarm bells for me. Did you hear it because it's true, or because it sounds compelling while being impractical to disprove?

Here is a source I found and repayment rates tanked after 2009

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/education/our-insights/t...

This source strongly suggests that the original claim is not true. I don't understand exactly what the X axis is meant to be, but if we assume the 2012 number is meant to represent 2009 graduates, it seems incredibly unlikely that the median graduate has made no progress after 12 years if ~62% of them began making progress after 3 years.

(Can you come up with a story where the two numbers might be consistent? Probably, yeah. Thus the impracticality of disproving weird conditional statistics like this.)

I can't find the source for the stat I mentioned originally but the data I did find doesn't paint the rosy picture of a getting college degree with debt being an unambiguously +EV decision.