Yea, I thought the same thing when reading the article, and have thought so previously about ISAs. At some level it's just pragmatism, since consistent attribu

Yea, I thought the same thing when reading the article, and have thought so previously about ISAs. At some level it's just pragmatism, since consistent attribution of income is difficult. The only defense is an informed applicant doing their research and determining that the expected value of the school's impact to their career is worth it. But more importantly, these problems don't actually have anything to do with ISAs! Any educational institution holds you responsible for tuition, regardless of how well they improve your earning ability. Why is an ISA somehow more exploitative than going into debt to get a humanities degree from a liberal-arts college with a consistently poor ROI? This is precisely backwards; ISAs are dramatically _less_ exploitative, as the size of the student-debt millstone is insensitive to your degree of financial failure and the school has no direct incentive to actually improve your earning capacity. Which brings me back to my initial point: The problem is bad schools with misleading messaging about their ROI, not a mood-affiliation-driven kneejerk reaction to a method of payment that's generally _less_ exploitative of students (in that it smooths out the risk, disproportionately sparing the worst off).