The actual problem isn’t college or student loans.

No, the actual problem is college and student loans and I will show you why.

ninety two percent of student loan debt is federal. you fills out your FAFSA you gets your check. This is because first the FFEL then the FDLP guarantee these loans, therefore they are the lowest rates available to anyone. Note that these debts are not serviced by the US Government, merely originated. THIS IS IMPORTANT: the servicers of these debts have zero input into who gets the loans and zero risk.

If you default on your student loan, your loan company reports you in default. The federal government pays out the total that you owe to the servicer. The government then garnishes your wages etc to pick-axe what you owe. That's been the same since 1958. What changed with the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention And Consumer Protection Act was that discharging student loan debt through bankruptcy went from "you can't do it until seven years after you graduate" to "you can't do it period ever we will claw your student loan debt back from your estate."

Sure - NAFTA moved a bunch of manufacturing jobs overseas. they had already been drowned by the service sector and of the jobs that required more education, a goodly portion of them were in - wait for it - education:

'cuz here's the thing. You gotta go to college to get a good job. The government will give you whatever money you need to go to college. Loan companies will make that money available to you no matter what because it's not their fucking money and even private loans are absolutely risk-free because not even bankruptcy will spare you. What happened next was entirely predictable.

Jeff Selingo has written like four books about this. I've read three of them. Ten years ago he argued that the way to pick a college is by the size of their endowment because it showed they were less predatory. Five years ago he argued that you shouldn't even bother, just find a b-tier place that will give you lots of scholarships because it ultimately doesn't matter. I was in architecture when all that sweet, sweet tuition money was flowing in back in like 2000-2004; my name is on the drawings for a couple dozen buildings that wouldn't exist without the bankruptcy protection gold rush. And I mean, here's the thing: for 30 years the only metric anyone cared about was US News and World Report (really!) and they very stringently never factored cost into their rankings.

It's the fucking colleges. non-academic staff has doubled in the past 25 years. You could play chicken-and-egg: if everyone is going to college, why not make it a requirement? If every job requires a college degree, why not send everyone? But no, it's not because all the good, no-college jobs went away. It's because they became college jobs without earning anyone any more money, and they became college jobs because everyone was going to college, and everyone was going to college because we created a society where eighteen year olds signed up to take on $120k in debt to get a degree that might pay them $40k a year eventually.

You know what everyone in the world admires? German engineering. You know what's a joke? German engineering. If you're an "ingeneur" in Germany you spent two years at trade school after finishing tenth grade. I have a super-skookum top-of-its-class German CNC machine that's the envy of the world and it was clearly designed and assembled by trade school kids. Anyone who has ever worked on a BMW (as opposed to merely driving one) will back me up - there's a whole bunch of amateurish bullshit in everything coming off the Continent.

And yet. Most people would rather have a BMW than a Cadillac.

Maybe the jobs are fine.

Maybe it's the fucking colleges.