So I mean if and YES I AM GIVING A COUNTERFACTUAL HERE, just to be clear, if you had the same situation as you great grandparents and you could have a good career without college, how many people would actually go? I cannot imagine that if you didn’t need college for a full time career type job most people would not go. Why? Because until college became a job requirement, very few people actually bothered to go. In fact, up until 1960, most people didn’t even bother with high school diplomas.

And what happened is exactly what I’m talking about. Basically, we took college and turned it into job training. Businesses decided that it was cheaper to require applicants to have training rather than to train themselves. So now, starting in about 1980s you couldn’t get an indoor, white collar job without a degree. So if you want to be middle class go to college. So of course if you think that being middle class requires a college degree, the price doesn’t matter. How much would you pay to be upwardly mobile? Or to avoid flipping burgers forever? So no matter how much college cost, the price point doesn’t matter. Especially once student loans were available. It’s like cancer drugs — how much is someone willing to pay for drugs to keep themselves or their kids alive? I mean you’re not really going to say “no, $500 a dose is too much to pay for my life” especially if you have access to loans.

If there were an alternative to this, if I could assure people that they could have a middle class professional job without college, then there’s no reason to bear the increasing costs of college and student loan payments. It’s about as much as a home loan at this point. Unless you’re convinced there are no alternatives, nobody’s taking out a mortgage sized loan.