Just throwing this out there. I've worked at both a public university and a public law school. I had students work for me if they were on a work/study program. I would get to know these students and their lives. Not the majority of them, but some of them had been going to post secondary schools for one degree or another for ten years. These types of students would say, "I just like going to school, reading and studying and the whole school experience." Or they would get a degree and then within a couple of months to a year decide that really wasn't the field they wanted to go into any longer, so they'd start on a new track. When do they start becoming a productive citizen of our country?
For my generation, if you got a student loan there were very specific things you were allowed to spend the money on. My students would spend a lot of their loan money on running to the very expensive coffee shop across the parking lot and buying expensive/fancy coffee drinks or they'd go out to dinner every night, etc. etc. As a full time employee I couldn't even afford to do that on a daily basis. They drove better and newer cars than I did.
There's one more issue that is equally important in the student loan discussion and that is why has a public university's tuition become so outrageous compared to what it used to be, say in 1995? I have two grown children who went to two different public universities, and both were very affordable, both in the early to late 1990's. I'm asking that question for others' input because I worked in administration at a public university and I saw how much money went to creating more and more upper administration positions that had never been there before and I considered unnecessary. Public universities now think hiring ex-corporate people is the way to go, thus corporatizing our universities.
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