Student Loan Debt Is Now as Big as the U.S. Junk Bond Market
There is definitely an education bubble.  It&#x27;s way too easy to get money for college.  You hear a lot of stories about the increasing costs of college and crushing debt on graduation, but you don&#x27;t hear a lot of stories of &quot;I wanted to go to college but couldn&#x27;t get a loan&quot;.  Almost everyone gets approved, regardless of their future ability to pay it back.<p>We need a fundamental shift in the way college is paid for.  Some (many?) would like to see a government funded system, others would like to see the removal of subsidized loans to bring prices back down (and leaving many unable to afford college in its wake).<p>Another solution is to let you go to school for free and then pay a percent of all your future earnings back to your college, or at least into a pool that pays for the next generation&#x27;s college.  Of course with that system, colleges would bias towards people who are pursuing profitable majors, so you&#x27;d probably see a lot more STEM degrees and a lot fewer of everything else, until it got oversaturated, but there is a very long lead time between &quot;too many degrees&quot; and &quot;no one studies this anymore&quot;.<p>In other words, the fundamental problem is that we tell kids that college is the only path, creating insanely high demand for the product, when in reality there would be plenty of people much better served learning a trade or skill instead of four years doing something hate for a useless degree they&#x27;ll never use.