US student debt question

[Simon_Jester]

Nationalize them and take away all the profit margins and the tuitions and thus debts might plummet.

The problem is that when you nationalize them, you nationalize what is taught. Imagine what would have been taught about racial biology in the Jim Crow South around 1910-1930, had this idea been in force.

About the same as what was taught in the Jim Crow South around 1910-1930.

It's not like the Deep South's private citizens were any more enlightened about race than their government.

[Terralthra]

There's no doubt that colleges which make you live on-campus are forcing you to raise your cost of food & board, but that doesn't seem like it's the majority position. Estimates range from 1/3 of all college students living on campus (Department of Education Firewatch Publication, 2009) to even lower:

When it comes to a student’s living situation, half of those polled (49.7%) said they would be living at home during the school year, while more than one-fourth (28.6%) will live in off-campus housing, one-fifth (18.7%) will stay in a dormitory or other type of college housing and a small fraction (1.3%) will live in a fraternity or sorority house.

Per that, at least half of all college students do exactly what you'd say they should do: live at home and exploit economies of scale.

Further, the US Census found that out of an estimated 16-18 million full-time enrolled college students, 2.2 million lived in on-campus housing. So, by that accounting, on-campus housed students account for 12.2-13.7% of all full-time students. Including part-time students makes that number shrink even further.

[Simon_Jester]

D-13, arguably the problem with the bachelors' degrees is volume, not the universities themselves. When the universities are trying to take on people who are, realistically, in the 40th or 50th percentile of the population... yes, they have to dumb down the material. Memorization and note-taking (which average people can do) take the place of complex mathematical and technical work (which they can't). Rehashing the ideas in someone else's work (which average people can do) takes the place of critical analysis and independent creativity (which they can't do, or can't do well)

The more people we send to college, the more dumbed-down degree programs we must create to give them something to do that's within their capacity.

In the majors that are insulated from this effect you still get very intelligent and fairly rigorous programs that are not pretentious or undereducated- certainly no worse than the typical home-school case who thinks his self-assigned reading makes him an expert.