Unlike regular loans, there are no qualifications for the United States of America's student aid programs and loan guarantees — they are available to any admitt

Unlike regular loans, there are no qualifications for the United States of America's student aid programs and loan guarantees — they are available to any admitted college student, even if you are going to circus college. Whereas in Germany, for example, even though universities have no tuition fees, only 28% of high school students (equivalent to 1150+ SAT) pass the exams needed to go to them. In the US, we don't pay for the whole thing, but we have no gate to pass through other than getting a college to admit you. The problem is the implicit assumption that colleges only admit the students that are quite capable of graduating, and that the degree will be worth it. Well, those things may have been mostly true at one point, I'm sure, but without any incentives, they're not really the case now. Graduation percentage is the key to seeing how far we fall short. First off, check out this amazing article: http://www.demos.org/blog/5/18/14/college-graduation-gap http://www.demos.org/blog/5/18/14/college-graduation-gap or just look at the most essential chart: http://www.demos.org/sites/default/files/imce/satincomegrad.png http://www.demos.org/sites/default/files/imce/satincomegrad.... Just to make this clearer, the average high school student scores about 1000 on the SAT (the NCAA only requires 800 for eligibility if you can pull a B average). The graduation percentages around 1000 are pretty bad, yet over 50% of high school students have gone to college since 1980, 60% since 1990 and up to 70% since then. These graduation percentages are very challenging data. Especially looking at the students that can benefit the most from the hoped-for added earning potential. So this is difficult to confront, because it causes cognitive dissonance with our self-image as a country of opportunity. If you were paying any attention during the mortgage crisis, you can see a pattern here. Everyone is encouraged to stretch to get the most expensive thing they can afford, and the loans are easy to come by. Well, almost; private lenders are actually kind of strict, which means that marginal and low-ability students (or those who have poor college grades) are shut out. As in this story, they have to go to their relatives to co-sign loans instead, or lose their sunk costs (and dreams) for lack of those last few thousand dollars. Again, this is for students who aren't qualifying for debt that can't be discharged in bankruptcy... If there was some kind of change to the employment market that significantly devalued the $1.3 trillion in student debt, that would be a heck of a write-off. So in our automated future, maybe we won't be deciding how to give everyone free money, but instead dealing with the gigantic amount of bad student loans we have on the books. Again, this article puts student debt at $1.3 trillion. That's almost twice as much as is outstanding on all car loans, except that the cars actually exist. A lot of people never get to drive their college education off the lot. How much student aid should we budget to provide for students who never graduate, or even those who we are pretty sure never will?