Wouldn't it be better to make college less expensive so that people don't have to go deep in debt in the first place?
Sure, but to me, there are far bigger fish to fry. Most college educated workers make far more in income, after paying their college monthly debt service. An average attorney charges $250 an hour. Shouldn't they pay something for the education? I'm far more interested in trying to help people who are willing to work hard but are having cash flow problems. I'd far more prioritize lowering the cost and barriers for trade schools, night school, community college programs and etc.
Most but certainly not ALL. Most brand new attorneys do not start out making $250/hr and my long time attorney charges me far less than that and he's close to retirement age. Some brand new and some long experienced attorneys work as public defenders, meaning they start out at around $50K/year and take years and years to get much higher than that. Teachers, social workers and nurses and some doctors and many other professionals with college and even graduate degrees certainly do not rake in anything close to $250/hr.
In my state, the state is mandated by the state constitution to pay for the majority of the funding of state universities and I believe, community colleges. The reality is that for the past 30+ years, each year, students have paid an increasingly larger share of the cost of attending university through ever increasing tuition. Now, most funding is from tuition, born by the student not the state. This is, imo, wrong.
It seems to me that a much better way to capture a proportional share of the increased earnings gained by obtaining a college (and almost always, graduate or professional degree such as law school, med school, etc) would be to increase state taxes based on income, with the increase largely going towards offsetting the cost of obtaining a college degree. I am less inclined to fully subsidize medical school, law school, some other professional schools but I am not opposed to it, given that we should be able to recap a large portion of the cost by taxing future earnings of high earning graduates.
As the parent of young adults, I can well attest to the drag on personal finances and on the economy that the high cost of post secondary education imposes on students. Although my husband and I were fortunate enough to be able to pay for the bulk of our kids' college educations, a couple still had some degree of student loans and one is still paying for law school loans. My kids are far, far better off than many of their friends who had to foot the entire bill for their education.
In real terms, this has caused an entire generation to postpone or foreogo home ownership and/or children. MANY young adults I know are struggling to repay student loans of greater than $1K/month and are working multiple jobs in order to cover rent. This is hardly irresponsible on the part of the young adults. It does, however, speak very much to the irresponsibility and shortsightedness and selfishness of their parents and grandparents who failed to adequately support public education or their children/grandchildren.
Yes, some/many/maybe most current students and recent graduates live a lifestyle in their college years that would have been impossible to even dream of when I was in college but again, I place the bulk of that blame on their parents who are unwilling for little Cloe or Hunter to put up with sharing a dorm room or eating ramen or not drinking themselves into a stupor 3 days a week, much less toddling off to campus without a car that is nicer than those their professors drive. So, that contributes a lot to student debt, as well. But it does NOT contribute to the cost of tuition or books and supplies. These days, in any science discipline, the cost of a single text book might well exceed the cost of 4 semesters worth of text books when I was in college---ANY of the times I was in college.
To me, this is all unconscionable. 18 year olds are legally adult but they do not have adult brains and very, very few of them have any realistic ideas about personal finance, the type of job/pay it will take to provide them with a lifestyle beyond subsisting or even to pay off the loans they agree to.