You want full bore socialism? This is how you get full bore socialism.

No part of government backed loans is laissez faire. The perpetrators of that bullshit should be strung up by there nethers.

"Free" college is fine as long as students compete for admission. It's not a birthright. Even trade-schools should require passing some minimal exam.

Take the decisions away from kids and give it back to school administrators. Fund the schools directly.

today, less popular programs are disappearing [ir]regardless of their worth to society.

fun fact: back when I was working a line job at Proctor and Gamble I couldn't be hired for full time as I didn't have a HSD or GED... (just several years of post secondary which required equivalence testing for admission anyway)...

absolutely nothing to do with the job which was pretty mindless drone work, but a condition of their liability insurance.

The problem is the boomer-ism that a college degree is the highest mark of culture and class and god forbid you get a trades job like the filthy "help". And they started gatekeeping. Wana stop flipping burgers and become an office drone do something meaningful and lucrative? Better have those 4 years on your resume. It became the minimum standard for the hint of social mobility. And then the government stepped in. With the government guaranteeing everyone can afford tuition, tuition skyrocketed. Students are sold on this with the li(n)e that "you'll make so much more that you can pay the loans off fairly quickly". And with the glut of money and increase in the number of students you got bloat. They had to find new professors for the new students and the quality of education plummeted while the number of new courses increased. And very few people are going to college to better round themselves or have a passion for the arts (the latter group are already set for life because their parents are rich or are older people going back after working for a few decades and have money to spare). They are there because the foot in the door at not starbucks or McDonalds requires a BA.

Can we fix it? And if so, how? Gotta crack down on student loans. They need a shit ton more regulation. If the government guaranteeing the money, than it needs to be money going to the best public interest, which means medical and tech jobs need priority. The arts classes are already subsidized by humanities requirements. And a number of those are pretty cynical. My mythology and "Film appreciation" professors both knew they were humanities requirements and were pretty lax. Mythology prof. just said "attend and you pass" but he had a pretty entertaining and informative set of lectures on Homer, Heracles, and the Norns. I actually introduced the film appreciation teacher to 70's japanese shocksploitation films, so we all had to write 10 pages on Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion.

Trolling of Anc aside, how is he wrong?

The thing I noticed about generations prior to Boomers is that they did at least consider doing things to help their offspring be better off. We fought for child labor laws because many in the 1800s had been exploited as children and wanted kids to get a basic education. The Boomer generation got a golden ladder to success, then kicked it out from under everyone else once they got theirs.

This isn't to say us millennials can't or don't work for what we have--we do, often to the tune of two or more jobs. That's nearly always been a requirement in California my entire life but even "cheap" areas feel the squeeze. I think it was @Elwood who mentioned one of his relatives and their spouses are having to co-share a house with another couple as employees of NASA because they're priced out of Alabama's market.

It's a struggle for those under 40.

It's our fault. We didn't have the gumption to work hard or the foresight to fight in WWII.

You also didn't have the gumption to live in an era of high wages and low costs requiring only a single income to live on. Shame on you.

Don't worry, Paladin assures us all our parents are rich. And when they die, we'll have the money to do the things we've always wanted! Like pay off our accumulating credit card debt . . . pay off student loans . . . buy a gently used car to replace the junker that's been contributing to said debt . . . maybe even finally get that surgery to correct that condition that's been ruining our health and making us miserable for years! And then we get to go straight back to the subsistence wages that have sucked so much joy out of the best years of our adult lives! All worth it so that a few megacorporation officers can continue to accumulate billions of dollars they don't even know what to do with.

Are you serious?

Laissez-faire means business sets whatever price it wants. It doesn't mean savvy consumers. If a college can convince enough people to pay through the nose for a basket weaving degree, that's the price that will be set . . . and you'll be right there to say "well obviously that degree is worth that much to those students."

In a laissez-faire world, where Greed Is Good, banks will make whatever predatory loans they think will make them a profit. No regulation means they can collude to set whatever conditions they want, and if that's the only way to pay for school then too bad. There will not be a white-knight business instantly popping up as an alternative every time an industry does something anti-consumer or anti-employee.

It's definitely a problem . . . but one that stems from our desire for freedoms. We could have a govt that pays for college but also sets the tuition, or professor salaries, or quotas for each degree so that grads don't find themselves competing with 50,000 people for 20,000 jobs . . . but we don't want that.

You mean like we already do in so many ways, most notably, Medicare. Medicare not only tells healthcare providers what they can bill, they also tell them what they'll pay...and they'll like it. Medicare is the largest payor for healthcare services in the United States by a large margin. All of the major health insurance giants follow Medicare's lead in most areas, with the only major difference being in the fee schedules.

Speaking of, medical billing is fundamentally broken. It's a shell game that makes cost, actual cost to the provider, irrelevant. Lets use pretend, round numbers for the sake of discussion.

200mg Ibuprofen tablet:

Cost to hospital: $0.01 each.
Insurance company: Due to our contract, you will bill me $10.00 for each tablet. But, I don't care about that number.
Also, Insurance company: I'm going to pay you $0.25 for each tablet and you'll take it and say, "Thank you" because that's all you're ever going to get. If you complain, I'll delay your check write and you'll have to take out an emergency loan to meet payroll.

In what other industry is that even remotely acceptable?

I've spoken with more than one Hospital CEO that says, "Medicare allows us to keep the doors open. Blue Cross is where we make a profit."

But banks wouldn't have made loans to people without the means to repay them without government guarantees.

it's like privatized for profit of human services is nothing more than extortive gatekeeping...

Ugh, sounds like car buying with extra steps