But if you get in the heads of people — and I did a focus group on this a year ago — you maybe went to school, it turns out it wasn’t for you or the school misled you, or you didn’t get a job in that field, and so you’re not really excited about paying back your $8,900 because you feel like you didn’t get anything for it.
Affluent people assume that student loan debt must be related to the high tuitions at top-tier schools with which they are familiar. DeLisle says that instead many of the defaults are occurring at lower-tier schools. The tuition and debt levels are low, but the students do not think they got anything out of the school, so they are reluctant to repay loans.
There is much more in this depressing interview. It is depressing how much of a discrepancy there is between a sensible policy on higher education and what we are actually likely to see.
We live in perverse times. There is intense political focus and energy dedicated to ‘problems’ no one has any idea how to solve, but which are probably minor issues. On the other hand, with higher education, there are plenty of great and likely effective ideas on how to solve an enormous problem, but zero political will to implement or even consider any of them; quite the contrary.
I suspect that this scenario is somehow politically optimal. Some problems are politically convenient, so it’s best to pick ones that can’t really be solved at any politically feasible amount of effort (so one can always keep virtue signaling by agitating for more), or to prevent solvable ones from ever getting fixed by entrenching the status quo.