1. Why are those flagships "not an option"? Because one cannot get in for academic reasons? Ok, fine. CUNY runs open admission. CUNY City College is 3 thousand dollars a year for city residents. And that is the City College - most certainly, you are better off there than in many private schools. And community colleges of some sort exist throughout the country: if you are not very smart (could not get into a decent public four-year college), you will not do any worse by going there than by paying tuition at a private residential college. And if you are smart, you can always transfer from a community college to a better school - saving on the first two years of tuition.
Because there are plenty of academically qualified people who don't get into flagships anymore because population growth has outpaced growth at those schools, and also because admission at good schools tends to be a crapshoot where, say, 90% of applicants would basically be qualified but some much smaller percentage gets in.
(And Simfan is right that City College ain't what it once was, BTW.)
2. If you are planning, say, an academic career (the one that will not pay high sallaries), there are multiple options out there that would allow you not to get that debt. I know: I did it (and I went to both college and to grad school in the US, without being eligible for any in-state tuition, or whatever).
Well, whoop-de-doo for you. In the real world, for most people, if you're planning on an academic career going to an expensive top-tier undergrad for 4 years is actually really important, and actually really boosts your chances of being able to have such an academic career! That exceptions exist does not change that general calculus.*
3. A 17-year old can choose to go to war. In many countries at the age of 17 you are supposed to choose whether you are going to study chemistry or romance languages for the rest of your life. In this particular case you, actually, need consent of an adult. I simply do not see what is the problem.
Two wrongs don't make a right. Being locked into one's future at such a young age is one aspect of the European model I profoundly wish to avoid. People need the option to escape, to change.
You assume that everyone thinks as rationally as you do about financial decisions when it comes to paying for college.
What do yo mean by "rationally"?
And if they do not "think rationally", this is, basically, an invitation to lock the young people out of college: stop subsidizing all thos cheap loans, and they will go work in McDonalds, as they should.
Okay,
wow, that is just sickening and I do not know how to respond.
Anyway, all of the defenses of the status quo you've made here, in addition to callously disregarding the circumstances in which people actually make these decisions, and fall back on lazy victim-blaming, you've failed as of yet to engage with the two most serious points here, that:
a)
uniquely among varieties of debt, student loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. I can understand a position that generally says "debts ought to be repaid," but what is the justification for this specially strict treatment vis-a-vis other sorts of debts?
b) the vagaries of the business cycle have screwed zillions of people for whom, in better years, those loans would have paid off instead.
...
*For the record, and not to get too personal, that is in fact the exact road I went down (going to an expensive school that was particularly well-known for producing PhD students, with an eye towards becoming one myself), though I realized too late that academia was not going to happen for me. Ergo I very much don't exactly take kindly to the suggestion that I deserve debtor's prison for decisions I made when I was 16/having to change gears. Thanks.
