Heaven forbid they just lower tuition.

[a2jc4life]

"Liberal arts" is also only a useful concept so long as colleges hold to a certain standard of education, thought, etc. In my experience, so far, everything has been dumbed down to the point that it's virtually meaningless.

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//The student loan debt problem is different from other types of debt since students can't get out of paying government-backed loans.//

Actually, it depends. Depending on how much money you make, you can pay back a government-backed student loan at an income-based rate and if, after 20 years (I think it's 20), you still owe on it, the remainder can be written off.

Something many folks in this thread are not accounting for is age. IF you go to college directly out of high school, there's a good bit of financial aid available. If you take even a year off, the available aid plummets. Even before that it can be something of a crapshoot. I had a good GPA and a really good SAT score, and I was awarded SOME financial aid by a couple of private Christian schools -- not nearly enough to cover the cost of tuition, never mind the cost of living wherever the schools were. I failed to get ANY financial aid at the state universities, in part because their own people don't know their stuff and gave me the same wrong information over and over and over, despite my questioning it. (Bottom line: I never could fill out the necessary paperwork beyond the FAFSA because they repeatedly insisted there wasn't any.) God forbid an "average" student should want financial aid.