I was asked what I think about Trump’s plan to not give federally backed college loans to students who want to pursue financially non-viable programs of study.
I don’t think it’s going to do much on a practical level because the success of the scheme hinges on students correctly reporting their major, which, as I have ascertained during my 20 years in American higher education, is not an easy proposition. Programs having to prove their financial viability will create an additional level of bureaucracy, and I know how we all love that. It’s not going to be much of a solution.
I do believe, and I think everybody would agree with me, that college loans as a phenomenon need to be phased out. We need to change our mentality around college education altogether. And by “we,” I mean both those who consume the product and those who sell it.
This will require a gigantic cultural shift. Every year, crowds of prospective students and their parents go on often long, grueling, and expensive trips to visit potential colleges. This behavior is insane and should not be happening unless we’re talking about seriously wealthy people who are not doing any of it on credit. Nobody else needs to visit anything. People should go to a cheap local state school, live at home (whether with parents or renting with a couple of friends they have known since elementary school), have a job, forget all of the ridiculous movies and TV series about the college “experience”, and not get into debt in order to buy that experience.
For a variety of reasons, most of them not bad, people mature later today than they did 40 years ago. They are pushed at the age of 18 out of family and community and plunged into a life of crushing freedom from any limitation and any responsibility that they go into debt to purchase. Look at those kids at Cornell with their drunken, drug-fueled orgy. These are very rich kids, so they will be fine. But how about normal young people who handicap their own lives with a mountain of debt to engage in something like this? Imagine how much happier these kids would be if they couldn’t stay up partying until 6 am because they had to be at work by 7.
Do you know why college education has become so expensive? The costs of actual instruction have not risen. What did rise is the “experience” aspect of higher education. Colleges compete in who offers an experience that looks as close as possible to the utter, stupid, idiotic fantasy depicted in whatever the modern version of Gilmore Girls is.
What Trump is doing is not going to solve this problem. We will have to solve this problem in our own heads. It’s definitely not going to be solved by college loan forgiveness because that’s an invitation to engage in more of this very crazy, self-defeating behavior.
Almost $2 trillion in college loan debt. Poured down the drain in a futile effort to pretend that class differences do not exist. This is the costliest experiment of keeping up with the Joneses in human history, and it needs to end.
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