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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The high cost of tuition is driven by the availability of federal loans to fund it.  The Department of Education could put a brake on the rising costs by imposing rules on schools for eligibility, including limiting the price tag, for tuition or for other expenses.  [/quote]

+1.   Stop making it so easy to get a loan for college, and the cost will go down.

[/quote]

Yeah this.   Would probably take an act of congress but as PP said no federal funding for private schools with tuition above a certain level.  Same provision for out-of-state public.  I bet the schools will adapt real quick and get 'lean' in areas with waste and overspending in order to lower tuition. Even the 'reachy lottery' schools don't like the optics of being seen as bastions of economic 1%ers, a change in federal loan law will make them stick out sorely and they'll move to fix, others will either follow or fold.  [/quote]

This is the sort of post I expect to see on a site like DCUM, where it seems like 90%+ of users have HHIs above $250k.  For the kids in those families, there's really no honest question about whether they can go to college.  Of course the vast majority can. Yes, the loans suck, and perhaps parents don't want to help, but it is at least a clear and feasible option for the vast, vast majority of kids in those situations.  And still would be possible almost regardless of what the government would do with federal student loans.

Then there's the families at or below the median household income of $68k per year.  Or even harder, in the bottom 10%, which in Maryland would mean about $25k per year.  In these cases, federal grants and loans are critical to simply giving these students have the option to go to college.

Cutting federal student loans programs wouldn't hurt the DCUM crowd.  Perhaps they'd benefit from slightly reduced tuition costs.  But it would absolutely hurt the many young adults to need this funding to have any hope of paying for college.

There's no easy answer here, but I don't think market forces are going to help without dramatically screwing over the lower socioeconomic classes.  Subsidies don't work well if you don't have tight control over the industries benefiting from those subsidies.  I personally think the best option is to dramatically improve the funding to public universities, making sure that they are affordable to all.  Federally-mandated state reciprocity agreements can help provide competition within the public education space.  Fix state/federal student aid to the public university tuition cost (with some adjustment to account for direct subsidies to the public schools), and hope that they'll fall in-line.

It might still create a two-tiered system of public and private schools, but I'm not overly worried about that.  Public research universities are already quite good. The top-end of public universities is first-rate.  The bottom tier won't be great, but that's probably OK for a variety of reasons.  I think the key would be making sure that the middle-tier public universities are on-par with private liberal arts colleges.  As part of this, it would make sense to try to make sure that there are plenty of smaller, public colleges with strong on-campus cultures, to replicate the benefits many of the private colleges give you. (See the University of Minnesota-Crookston as an example)[/quote]

It would work if the government, rather than oking massive amounts of loans at all levels, would provide higher grants to lower socioeconomic folks in return for a certain number of years of govt service.  Just like the military.  Then those folks get a college education, the government has an increased pool of workers that potentially become career govt workers, and loans are now discharged in bankruptcy so the lenders put pressure on the schools for more reasonable tuition rates. [/quote]

You don't means-test primary or secondary schools, nor do you attach stipulations.

Just make college cheaper for everyone. It's absolutely feasible if we focus on public universities and colleges.[/quote]

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