Having properly educated people are one of the biggest assets a country can have and a great investment for the future.
I don't believe in paying off student loans by the government but somehow we should make college education more affordable or free for the ones who deserve it not only who can afford it.
The system we have is unsustainable and broken.
It would be a great use of our tax dollars and will protect our leadership position in the long run.
The problem with the democrat party's line of thinking about "making college affordable" is that it actually made it more expensive.
Back in the good old days, if you were a kid with good credit you'd build a business plan, walk into your bank, and ask for a student loan. They would expect you to explain what the degree will cost, the data that shows how quickly you'll find a job, and what the prevailing wage is for the occupation. Accountants, lawyers, doctors, chemists, engineers...they all got their loans.
Because YOU actually had to go get the loan, you understood the severity of the situation and the effort involved in obtaining and repaying that loan. It created disinterest in college for many wise people, so universities had to contain their costs so their tuition was reasonable enough to get customers.
Perfect example: A relative of mine enrolled for his MBA at Wharton in 1965 for less than $6000. That would be CPI adjusted to $60,000 in today's dollars. But due to easy money, bad credit, no credit, today a Wharton MBA is over $250,000!
How did this outrageous inflation of college happen? By making college affordable (trademark: DNC lingo). The Stafford Loan came about and we nationalized student loan debt. $22,500 per year regardless of the shitty school, the terrible major, your awful credit, and your terrible high school grades. Overnight, every for-profit infomercial university raised their tuition to (drumroll)....$22,500 or higher.
What ended up happening is people that had no business going to college went to cut-rate colleges. They lived a lavish lifestyle off their loans. They never graduated. They attended such bad schools for nursing and other practicum required degrees that the shady schools couldn't get them access to hospitals to do their required rotations. Net result, a worthless degree, no license as an RN or LPN, $90,000 in debt plus interest.
This "making college affordable" nonsense and the government programs have only created a slave class and misery. It's spiked the costs of university degrees astronomically. If you haven't shopped around, you don't realize how bad its become. My nationally recognized MBA cost me $78,500 in 2005, that same program is now $180,000! Think about that for a minute. At the time of enrollment, the 65 students in the executive MBA's average age was 30, their average salary was about $130,000. Thus, their MBA was a bit over HALF A YEAR'S salary! Today, the average salaries are the same, but the program is 170% of a YEAR's salary!
This was all because citizens suck at math and we made college access possible for everyone.
We don't need more college graduates. We don't need more humanities degrees. We don't need more psychologists. Yet the US taxpayer is underwriting the cost of these degrees we do not need that creates in roads to a profession that can never repay them.
What we did and do need are more minority skilled laborers with good training making six figures. With 2-years of paid training, anyone without a drug problem, illegitimate kids, or a criminal record can be upper middle class in the same amount of time it takes to graduate from university.