This article unfortunately is lacking in useful content; the real value is in the comment section. For example, one commenter says: do the first two years in a community college and save a bundle.<p>How we got here is a complex story that can't be explained in a few sentences loaded with obvious partisan snipes e.g. "the Republicans privatized Sallie Mae", while neglecting to mention the Bush Administration's repeated warnings about reckless lending at Sallie Mae and Freddie Mac that went ignored by a Democrat-controlled Congress. There's more than one side to the story.<p>One of the main problems of course is that universities find it easier to raise tuition than to cut costs. Budgets rise, tuition rises, and students simply borrow more money, in a kind of death spiral that is now reaching its logical conclusion: hundreds of thousands of graduates crippled with enormous debts and an inability to earn the necessary income to pay them off.<p>When I compare the campuses of today with those of the 1970s, when I was in university, and earlier in the 1960s and 1950s when my elders were in school, I am aghast at the ridiculous and profligate expenditures that have little or nothing to do with higher education. Student activity centers came into vogue in the '70s and were built all over the country: theaters, game rooms, snack bars and restaurants, activity rooms, etc.<p>Today they are like malls complete with food courts, clothing shops, Starbucks, cyber cafes or free wifi zones -- palatial, sprawling, with high ceilings, multi-tiered glass and steel structures that run into the hundreds of millions of dollars in construction costs and then many millions in operational costs.<p>Dormitories were once the most basic housing imaginable, concrete blockhouses full of doubles and triples with cheap mattresses on wooden platforms, a cheap dresser, and military style bathrooms. Today in some places at least, they are like luxury condos.<p>Forgiving loans is not an option. Millions of Americans worked hard to pay off their own loans and feel little sympathy for those who foolishly over-borrowed.<p>The only solution is a simple one: cut costs. According to my academic friends, many universities today have more bureaucrats than professors, and better paid than professors, too. Cut the staff to the bare bones, eliminate the Olympic swimming pools and town-within-a-town developments, and focus on one thing: education.<p>I could run a university for a fraction of the cost by renting an old warehouse, subdividing into a few lecture halls and rooms, hire 20-30 professors, a custodian or two, get a bunch of chairs and white boards and wifi routers, and poof! education will result. Students can live at home and brown-bag it. In fact I've often thought about doing this. Find a bunch of professors who are sick of dead-end adjunct jobs and offer them a way to take back their lives.