COLUMN: Students loans protect a broken system

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Student loans are too easy to get.

Most private loans are a bad idea, I feel like we can all agree on that, but I’ve begun to think even the “safest” fixed-rate federally guaranteed loans are just a bad idea.

This is probably an unpopular viewpoint on a campus where housing, credit hours, sandwiches, clothes and computers are funded primarily through Stafford loans and other forms of aid, but it has become far too simple to doom our financial futures in order to maintain our lives today.

There are students who have no idea what I’m talking about. Whether through planning, excruciating work, family wealth or scholarships, there are still some students who managed to make it through school with little to no debt. But the fact remains that most students do take out fairly substantial loans, and the anchor of debt chained to graduates increases year after year on average.

$25,000 may not seem like a life-ending load to bear, but when financed at 6 percent and paid off with part-time as a barista, it can substanitally limit the choices a recent graduate can make in the decades after graduation.

There are horror stories, six-figure debt for interpretive dance degrees, students who buy cars with private loan refund checks before totalling the Camaro and dropping out as sophomores, but the vast majority of students take out loans that have been deemed reasonable in order to improve their chances of landing a job, or maybe even improve themselves as a person.

The free-flowing federal student loans make it far too easy for students, who are often a terrifying combination of willfully ignorant and teenaged when they first sign up for aid, to sign up for a difficult future they don’t fully understand.

Debt was originally government guaranteed and not subject to bankruptcy protection because the amounts were small and repayment was virtually guaranteed by the careers a college degree once opened up. However, as balances have ballooned and job prospects for graduates dwindled, the policies that made sense in the ‘60s and ‘70s seem irresponsible and unsustainable.

So let’s cap five-year debt at $20,000 for students at public universities. At a time when state funding makes about a quarter of university funding for state schools in Michigan, it stands at 16 percent for CMU students. Cutting off student loans would make it more difficult for schools to continue making up for funding deficiencies — as it stands right now schools know that students will simply be forced to make up the difference with an increase in debt, it’s not as if we can ask for raises at our minimum wage jobs and unpaid internships.

So we are left with an array of troubling choices, but the time for an honest conversation is well-past. Should admission standards be raised in order to focus more funding on fewer students? It’s the sort of suggestion myself and lots of other left-leaning Americans would have shouted down ten years ago, but the situation on the ground has changed, and appears to have changed permanently.

Student debt subsidized education continues to advance the customer model of education, in which students pay their professors for degrees in order to land jobs.

Should American universities begin to cut programs that produce underemployed graduates, as Chinese institutions have begun doing? As the future owner of a creative writing degree, the suggestion cuts counter to what I believe higher education should provide and represnt, but such drastic measures are inevitable unless issues of funding are addressed, and soon.

Massive debt has become another part of daily life for a generation of professors, students, drop-outs and alumni, but there’s no reason past mistakes have to be maintained for tradition’s sake. Higher education is in need of financial reform and further putting the burden, and interest, on students backs guarantees a troubled future.