I bleed maroon said:
Pretty good and mostly balanced discussion on this topic, here. Good job.
1. I think the #1 issue that should be concentrated on is "making college more affordable". This should appeal to government, students, parents, and economists. Naturally, the college administrators and professors will object, but they have proven to be somewhat immune to market forces for quite some time (they and health care are the only sectors that have been sustaining around double-digit annual increases in this low inflation rate environment). It's time to cut back on making campuses into country clubs and inject some market rationality into tenured professors paychecks.
2. The "moral hazard" of arbitrarily forgiving debt for some, but not others is a show-stopper for me. Financial responsibility should be rewarded, not punished.
3. The concept of letting banks specifically underwrite loan candidates is intriguing, but probably not practical in this political climate. Perhaps a simplifying set of standards (like a percentage guarantee based on credits completed or progress toward a degree) can directionally have an impact. I do have an issue with what to do with the poor schmuck who tries hard, but unfortunately finds out a year or two in that they're not college material. Which leads me to . . .
4. MOST IMPORTANTLY - I think we should absolutely have a directional forgiveness approach for those who enter certain forms of public service. For instance, peace corps, military or military support jobs, public defenders, law enforcement, public school teachers, park rangers, etc. Say, partial forgiveness starting at two years, and full forgiveness at five years of service? Some of this is done by certain states, but it could probably be made into a national program? I think this would be money well spent for society (as opposed to a blanket handout), and gives the people who "demand" loan forgiveness an open avenue to obtain it via working off the debt.
I'm just going to make a point of clarification - certainly university administrators care about the cost of tuition, but your average professor does not, at least not at public schools. And the big reason why is because profs have absolutely zero say in what tuition is. Also, professors have watched tuition costs skyrocket but their salaries have remained relatively flat. Any school that faces a budget "crisis" ( and they all do in most years), the first thing that gets cut are faculty and staff raises - which are usually only 1-3% per year anyway. When I worked in higher ed, I went several years with no raise at all - not even COL. The only other way for profs to maybe get a raise is through a promotion from assistant to associate prof or from associate prof to full prof, but even that's not guaranteed. And you only go up for associate prof once (that's tenure - if you don't get it, you are essentially fired) and some associate profs never get promoted to full prof (for a variety of reasons, budget cuts being one of them).
This is a link I found to a credible salary survey. It's a few years old, but looking at the average salary for an engineering assistant professor ($82k), it's not much more than what I was making when I left academics in 2010. And, depending on what type of school the prof works for, the associate prof salary isn't that much better than the assistant, considering the blood, sweat, and tears that goes into earning tenure. The "real money" in academics is either in administration (which has become ridiculously bloated at most schools) or an endowed professor position (which is typical funded by private donations).
https://www.higheredjobs.com/salary/salaryDisplay.cfm?SurveyID=39A group that will have a lot to say about this are the members of every state legislature. For years, most state legislatures have capped what state universities can charge. They set the tuition rate (or range or upper limit) and all the schools conform to that. They do this to sort of keep things equal among the state schools, to help flagship schools keep their flagship status, and to keep the better schools from out competing the smaller schools (this is a big issue in small states with lots of schools, like MS and AL, which also happen to have a lot of HBCUs).
The legislatures are going to yell because over the past 20-30 years, state funding for most universities has dropped dramatically. A lot of "state" schools get less than 10%, and even less than 5%, of their funds from state tax dollars. Universities are funded by tuition and overhead on research grants.
So, if you lower tuition, schools are going to expect states to make up the difference with tax dollars. Or, they are going to have to start cutting, and unfortunately, when universities cut, the thing that suffers most is undergraduate education.
