So, if college is free, what’s to stop colleges from simply doubling tuition? Or offering more watered-down useless subjects to capture the rent from the larger population of students who will go to ‘free’ college but can’t handle the curriculum in fields that would land them good jobs? What would stop them from inventing reasons to bloat administration even more?
The only answer to that would be price controls on college admission, or wage controls on staff. Which would be a terrible idea.
A better ‘fix’ to the student loan crisis would be to make colleges have some skin in the game. If they were on the hook for a percentage of student loan money that defaults, they’d be a lot more careful about their finances, tuition, and which programs they offer.
Ideally, student loans should not exist at all. They have caused tuition inflation which basically makes student loans mandatory for people who are not wealthy, and they have encouraged the growth of useless faculties offering useless degrees that will not pay enough for the student to comfortably pay back the loans.
Better answers would involve co-op education programs, apprenticeships, more of a focus on 2-year colleges as transfer programs into 4-year universities, and online education.
Also, cut all funding and tax breaks to schools sitting on massive endowments. Harvard’s 2018 endowment is 38 billion dollars.
If we are going to have student loans, they should be targeted at skills are in short supply. You want to be a doctor or an engineer? You’ll be making lots of money one day, so sure, we’ll give you a student loan. You want to go to college to ‘find yourself’ and take a bunch of liberal arts programs? Find a way to pay for it yourself. Or go to a two year college and learn somethiung useful, then indulge your desire for other learning online, at night school, or with a sabbatical.
No one owes you four years of partying while taking a light schedule of watered down ‘breadth’ courses.