COLLEGE STUDENT LOANS AND THE GOVERNMENT

                The federal government now controls the whole student loan market. Barclay (a major global finical services provider) said in 2010 that by the year 2020 the student loan default would be estimated at nearly 225$ billion dollars. Americans owe more on student debt loans than on credit cards. The average debt for a graduating student is around 20,000-25,000$. Now I don't believe that the government should be involved in anything (or exist at all) but of all the things it screws up, it most certainly shouldn't meddle with the education system. If you were to take the government backed loans out of the picture then colleges would have to lower tuition in order to encourage students to continue coming. Tuition prices are high because universities can set them high because students will have government guaranteed loans paid for by tax dollars. The ones who benefit from these enormous tuition costs are not the students. They have tens of thousands of debt pilled on their shoulders by the time they're in their mid twenties. It isn't the tax payers who are stuck to pay for enormous amounts of debt accrued by government inefficiency.  The only ones who profit from these high costs are the universities themselves, who sell vastly overpriced degrees in subjects that will unlikely help students receive a job once they leave college.  Studies have shown that almost half of graduates are either underemployed or outright jobless.

                 People may say that investment in human capital is never a waste of money but the fact is that this is not human investment, its overpaying for degrees that border on being worthless. "Free" education does not help stimulate the economy, there is billions of dollars of debt because of this! My generation is leaving college with back breaking debt, unable to receive a job of any kind because of worthless degrees and minimal wage laws (another subject for another time) and people still insist that government intervention is helping. Peter Schiff said "People went to college before government got involved, it just didn't cost nearly as much. They could work their way through college and graduate debt free, now they're graduating with mortgages." Another argument is that without government loans then only the rich kids could afford to go to college, but WITHOUT government loans the cost of going to college would go down thus allowing more people to afford college. Yes, some people still wouldn't be able to afford to go to college, but then they'd have to look for different options, such as going into a trade. The massive increase of college applicants has left a constantly decreasing amount for trades such as carpentry, welding, masonry, etc despite the finical superiority that the trades have over a college education. As with everything that it meddles in, government has succeeded in driving up the price for education while destroying the quality, something that is only achieved by having a monopoly, which would certainly not exist in a free market society.