Comment by scarmig
4 hours ago
That's a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.
Treating universities as a system, it is deeply problematic and even immoral to saddle students with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to enter programs that it is entirely predictable that the student will fail at.
The solution is to use all the methods available to predict how successful the student is likely to be after matriculating, not to water down curriculum to the point where the most marginal student in the class will pass.
But universities need the tuition to support ever more bloated administrative hierarchies and salaries. Most are in a state of abject panic because international graduate enrollments (a cash cow) are way down in the past couple of years. Staff layoffs are starting to happen, which were previously almost unheard of.
No, moral is to make student loans subject to regular bankrupcy. Student should be also able to get refound, if university misrepresents or lies about their job prospects!
Universities are business as any other!
That would be a reform I'd get behind.
At the same time, it's still a bad use of funds, and lenders likely wouldn't have the ability to discriminate based on likelihood of bankruptcy or success in an academic program. So it just shifts costs from the student unlikely to succeed to the lender and students likely to succeed.
At that point you don't have a loan, you have a subsidy. That's OK though, many countries do have that.