In the 1980s, Democrats produced data showing that a college degree meant hundreds of thousands of dollars in lifetime earnings difference than a high school diploma. It should be a right, they said, and universities readily agreed. Student loans became unlimited and suddenly it wasn't just rich dumb kids or scholarship winners, everyone could go everywhere.

Most of us outside policy at the time thought it was a bizarre thing to do. When has cost not expanded to meet a pool of easy money? The most recent example is American health care, where most people pay 400% more for lower quality because the 700,000 who couldn't get health insurance in 2010 turned into subsidies for 50,000,000. Prior to that it was a housing bubble created by making banks fill out a stack of paperwork if they turned down a loan and facing hefty fines if government decided they were wrong, but giving them a government guarantee if they went ahead and approved it. Housing at the low end increased substantially and then the sub-prime crisis occurred. Prior to that it was universities expanding costs to suck up the new money, where tuition and fees outpaced inflation by 800% after student loans became unlimited.

It was always the case and is today that taking out a loan for a journalism degree, or music, or lots of other fields because you like doing them is a bad idea.(1)



The problem for most students speaks to why it was a bad idea to take out a loan to get a degree in creative writing. The things that have real value require math and science ability to understand problem-solving. Those fields make a loan reasonable.

Otherwise, you will still make more money than you would make without a degree, but if you took out a large loan to do it, you are worse off.

Over 50 years ago, Republicans warned opposing party claims, along with university lobbyists inside that tribe, that higher education meant higher wealth were not telling an accurate story. Taking out student loans didn't make a lot of poor students better off, it made things worse. Yet until universities accept their share of the blame, and stop instead pushing the narrative that only "for profit" colleges are the predators, young people will continue to be exploited.

NOTE:

(1) You wouldn't know how complicit universities were in lobbying for the change in student loans, or how much they benefited, because corporate media only demonize "for profit" schools. They're all for profit. Harvard didn't get the endowment of a small country's GDP by being nonprofit, they did it by charging students as much tuition as they could afford to shoulder. And how much government grants they could get for bizarre unscientific work like that produced by Harvard School of Public Health.