The reason why student debt is basically unheard of in Denmark since college is free (although to make that happen, the Danish government poses high taxation towards citizens like they do in order to maintain stable social security nets like subsidised healthcare and public housing, also why they have less homelessness).
Mainly Danish, Swiss and European citizens are eligible to study without stressing over student debt upon graduation. It stems from this: Danish government is more on for the people while American government is more on caring about themselves plus nepotism on the side (MORE & HIGHER TAXES TOO ON TOP OF THAT).
People are talking about taxes, but there is one part that is overlooked in how the decisions were being made.
College in the USA used to be much cheaper. The federal government gave state governments land to sell in order to fund “land grant colleges”, basically the top of most states’ public education system. There was massive funding into these colleges, which generally meant that private colleges needed to be somewhat competitive with poorer students. Government funding continued through the middle of the twentieth century with the GI Bill and a mix of federal and state aid to keep tuition low.
However, starting in the 1990’s, three things started happening. First, millennials were getting ready to go to college in a wave that colleges had never seen, requiring the building of new facilities. Second, school rankings were becoming more important, so colleges started chasing clout and that chase cost money. Third, financial aid started to incorporate student loans as a way for kids to pay for college.
So, tuition costs soared as colleges were spending massive amounts of money on new buildings and ways to increase prestige while aid programs shifted to loans. In a lot of cases, states even pulled back funding as student loans could fill the void. Students still came as it was seen that a college education was required to have a good middle class life in the future.
Now that the millennial wave has crested, colleges are dealing with massively falling student numbers, which is a major problem given it became a significant revenue source.
Yep, great comment.
And right now a lot of schools are shutting down because they can’t enroll enough students and they charge way too much to attend. Like 12 schools in my state have closed in the past 2 years. These are typically cheaper schools too, but students don’t want to go to cheap schools, so they don’t apply.
Basically, it’s a story of gluttony and greed.
The pricing dynamics of college education is also obscured. Basically, the reason they all charge so much is because they don’t want to look ‘cheap’. So if one place hikes tuition, they ALL have to do it, because they don’t want to seem ‘cheap’ compared to a competitor. Nobody wants to go to the ‘cheap’ school.
There are great studies about how many colleges, when they increased their sticker prices, saw more students apply to go there. Because if you apply between a uni that charges 50K an one that charge 100K, the 100K one MUST be better. right? This means all the cheaper universities inflated their prices to look competitive with the more expensive ones.
BUT the real cost that students pay at both places is pretty much the same.
this misses what happened to public colleges, like the land grant colleges you mention. at the height of counterculture, campuses exposed everyone to powerful ideas that made them do all kinds of organizing against the establishment. for example in 1970 the Ohio National Guard was called onto Kent State University and fired over sixty rounds into anti-war protestors, killing four. Ronald Reagan became California Governor, defunded universities, and introduced tuition to stop this onset of class consciousness; in his words, to bar “undesirables” from college. then in 1975, NYC went almost bankrupt, and regretfully adopted the same measures upon the City University system in a ton of cuts to tackle $14 billion and growing in debt. thus the same policies spread across the rest of the US. a similar reason is why the “leftist” party in Britain managed to landslide against 20 years of Conservative rule by promising to introduce tuition.