The truth about student loans

Summary: Political rant with editorialized title. Speaker advocates for cuts to student loan programs to produce massive cuts the university budgets leading to decreased program quality but affordable prices.<p>I'm not sure this is even worth criticizing because frankly this guy is completely clueless, but:<p>* The decreased program quality part seems to be skimmed over.<p>* Educational institutions that just react to market forces are bad educational institutions. Market forces result in grade inflation and low graduation standards, something I think most people agree are extremely unfortunate trends.<p>Alternative proposal: Redirect student loan subsidies from students towards institutions directly, possibly also bias the subsidies towards public institutions. The result should be lower tuition for everyone, mild downward forces on private institutions' tuition costs, hopefully no cuts to program quality and reasonable levels of affordability for reduced income students who will still rely on need-based aid more than loans and continue to have fairly cheap public schools they can opt to go to.

The government is merely the enabler here. The other part is the unshakable belief by most Americans that four years at a private liberal arts college is worth $200K.

The problem is that the opposite system - publically funded high education has even deeper flaws.<p>Many students choose completely useless programs (straight to unemployment), students don't fell entitled to criticize anything, and of course the universities don't treat them like paying customers.

I heard about <i>The Underground History of American Education</i> here on HN during a discussion about Bill Gates. Someone said they wished Bill were more into Gatto (author of Underground History) than the Knowledge is Power program.<p>I wish I could post this link to HN and have it sit at the top for a while because I think everyone should read this book.<p>Gatto, who was an NY and NYC teacher of the year and publicly resigned in the Op Ed of the WSJ, traces out the origins of compulsory school and it's detrimental effects brilliantly.<p><a href="http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm</a>

Eh. It's the good old escalation argument all over again. Sure, you can fix some problems by cutting the broken solutions and letting it escalate until it solves itself. Sure, the end result will be better than the status quo, but why would anyone ever want to go through the mess that would lie in between if short-term planning is so strongly encouraged (by human nature, if nothing else)‽

I always feel the need to squirrel away more gold under the mattress after listening to Schiff talk.

I have doubts that the guy would manage to single-handedly publish any piece of legislation. So while there is some economical talk, it's actually more towards a political fund gathering talk.

I have calculated that I will be 40 before my student loan will be paid off... I've been paying it since 2003

amazing.