Student loan debt just topped $1.52 trillion

We’ll see much lower rates of homeownership and fewer people starting businesses.

Cheap loans were madness.

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And hopefully lower costs of attending universities.

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There is no reason to believe that this will happen

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I was looking at my budget this morning and messing with future planning. I think we can save $120k by the time my 2 kids are entering college. I looked at that number and thought, "That's probably not enough."

That's absurd.

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It's absolutely absurd

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End the federal loan programs, and it will happen.

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This is really the only way

College tuition has outpaced inflation by double every year since the 1950s

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This is going to be a disaster of epic proportions

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If the federal government wasn’t involved I would agree with you. With a debt this astronomical with nothing tangible attached to it one would think the foundation would have already started to give. I mean who goes under in this situation? All of the pressure is on the student.

Federal loan programs have already begun to be dismantled by Trump (see the upcoming cap on post graduate loans he's implementing).

But they'll end effectively because the Treasury will be out of money around 2021, once the CBO says the entire federal budget will be consumed by Social Security, Medicare and interest on the debt.

It'll be difficult to keep undergraduate loans intact when the government will have to issue debt (probably at rates of 4%+ by then) just fund those 3 items, not to mention the rest of the federal government operations.

Higher education is the only bubble leftover from the last 20 years or so that hasn't popped.

Paraphrasing Margaret Thatcher, sooner or later the government will run out of other people's money. It will play out as a combination of no one will want to buy our debt (which is already beginning with respect to Treasury auctions) and/or the Fed will be the main buyer of Treasury debt, effectively printing money, which devalues our currency and penalizes savers/incentivizes debt as they try to inflate away the coming debt tsunami.

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End the federal loan programs, and it will happen.

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Credit supply and the rise in college tuition: Evidence from the expansion in federal student aid programs

Causality established

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When students fund their education through loans, changes in student borrowing and tuition are interlinked. Higher tuition costs raise loan demand, but loan supply also affects equilibrium tuition costs—for example, by relaxing students’ funding constraints. To resolve this simultaneity problem, we exploit detailed student-level financial data and changes in federal student aid programs to identify the impact of increased student loan funding on tuition. We find that institutions more exposed to changes in the subsidized federal loan program increased their tuition disproportionately around these policy changes, with a sizable pass-through effect on tuition of about 65 percent. We also find that Pell Grant aid and the unsubsidized federal loan program have pass-through effects on tuition, although these are economically and statistically not as strong. The subsidized loan effect on tuition is most pronounced for expensive, private institutions that are somewhat, but not among the most, selective.

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Federal loan programs have already begun to be dismantled by Trump (see the upcoming cap on post graduate loans he's implementing

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This is the wrong place to start. We need to cap undergraduate loans first and foremost, since that is the vast majority of borrowing and also where most of the problems occur.

We shouldnt start limiting the borrowing power of people going for advanced degrees who have a much higher probability of paying back their loans.

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End the federal loan programs

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An easier step would be to end the college remedial track.

If you have to spend the first four semesters at college learning stuff covered in high school, then maybe college isn't for you..

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This is the wrong place to start. We need to cap undergraduate loans first and foremost, since that is the vast majority of borrowing and also where most of the problems occur.

We shouldnt start limiting the borrowing power of people going for advanced degrees who have a much higher probability of paying back their loans.

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Indeed.

I find it (depressingly) hilarious that doctors and lawyers pay higher rates of interest than undergrads. Because professionals are the ones defaulting on our loans and not the Gen Ed majors, I guess.

Should start garnishing wages. I know plenty of folks that lived the high life and now don’t want to pay it back. I say frick em!