It's really a perfect storm of destruction, driven by greed and exploitation. 1. If you are a young person and aspire to "middle class" employment, in 90% of c

It's really a perfect storm of destruction, driven by greed and exploitation. 1. If you are a young person and aspire to "middle class" employment, in 90% of cases you need a 4-year degree. The reason this is true is simply because potential employers will prefer an applicant vetted by a college admissions council versus a not-vetted candidate. It's a basic signalling arms race. 2. Many professions such as law and medicine legally require purchase of the appropriate degree. There is no option for apprenticing or self-study and sitting the licensing exams without the degree. If you want the profession, you are required by state law to buy in. And the degree-supplying institutions have no qualms about "finessing" employment/income statistics (if they even pretend to collect them) and the like to give the impression entrance in such professions is like winning the lottery. So you have two sources of basically inelastic demand for these little sheets of paper from young people anxious to find a seat in society. If you are a supplier of such sheets of paper, how do you exploit this situation for maximum profit? After all, 18 year olds don't have the cash in their pockets to be defrauded of. The solution, of course, is the federal government. Make a deal with the federal government that in exchange for risk-free blank checks from the federal taxpayer, you, the degree-supplier, will graciously grant these poor 18 year old saps with seals of approval from your fine academic institution. Once you have have this deal arranged, blow tuition through the roof, say 500%+ in the past 10 years, with precisely 0 correlation to actual costs or say competition in some sort of "free market" where firms are actually exposed to "risk" etc. Congratulations sir, you are now wealthy. You won America! Oh, it's not fair to indenture teenagers with mortgage-equivalent debts at usurious interest rates for a service most first world nations provide for free or limited expense? Doesn't matter: 'merica. Oh, it's not constitutional to disallow discharge of these exploitation debts in bankruptcy? Doesn't matter: 'merica. I think basically the question is: why aren't we fucking over young people more? I think if they want a college/professional degree we should make them sign contracts like "In exchange for this most valuable degree, any money I ever earn over $30,000 annually for the rest of my life goes straight to Uncle Sam, and/or the appropriate collections agency".