Building a new university is difficult.  Buying investment paper from Sallie Mae is easier.<p>Building a traditional bricks-and-mortarboards university with actual tenured professors and students seeking valuable skills and knowledge is difficult.  Making a half-assed university that gets all its revenue from government grant and loan programs while its graduates can&#x27;t find jobs decent enough to pay off their loans is easier.<p>As long as there are ways for people to invest and reap the benefits rather than spend money and do the actual work, there will be investment bubbles, because there will never be any shortage of humans who would prefer to sit on ass and cash fat checks than to sweat all day for little visible return.<p>You alma mater pisses me off.  It could have hired 80 non-adjunct employees, and built a new building with 40 classrooms and 100 offices in it.  Instead, it hired one guy, whose job is apparently to beg people to give the school more of their money.  And specifically, beg from alumni, many of whom will now be debt-encumbered and underemployed because they spent too much in tuition, learning things that don&#x27;t help them to create beneficial economic activity, from people who are essentially underpaid temps with no future career path within the school.<p>The availability of the loans just makes it easier for schools to raise tuition without providing better service.<p>If you take away the loans, it&#x27;s true that people who want degrees will have fewer opportunities, but one of those opportunities will likely be to attend school in a strip mall cubicle, learning from robot-assisted professors, for $500 a semester, plus $50 per credit-hour.  That dude is going to learn just as much as the guy in the swanky dorm with theater-quality lecture halls and famous professors, but it&#x27;ll cost him $10k instead of $200k.<p>Throwing money at a problem does not help, unless you are throwing it specifically at those people who are capable of fixing it.