It is possible, if not implicitly rational, to advocate for student loan debt relief AND to concurrently suggest that some fields no longer need a college degree.
For those of you who were too young to remember, there was once a time where merit-based scholarships were not bound to household income; thanks to the Reagan administration, that changed radically in the middle 1980s, with the result that gifted students from middle-income households which possessed any sort of investment income were harshly penalized, without an offset for family size, when it came to financial aid.
Even at a state school, the costs associated with student financial aid (or, stated differently, resulting indebtedness post-graduation) remain one of the key factors at ensuring positive financial stability after graduation.
The issue, though, is that most colleges and universities excel at a narrow range of innovation, while leaving much of the heavy lifting and banal achievement to private industry (in the general sense), whether corporate or individual in scale of effort. Much of this effort is by its nature experiential (though not all of it) and requires individual, life-long learning to contribute to the ecosystem.
For those of you who were too young to remember, there was once a time where merit-based scholarships were not bound to household income; thanks to the Reagan administration, that changed radically in the middle 1980s, with the result that gifted students from middle-income households which possessed any sort of investment income were harshly penalized, without an offset for family size, when it came to financial aid.
Even at a state school, the costs associated with student financial aid (or, stated differently, resulting indebtedness post-graduation) remain one of the key factors at ensuring positive financial stability after graduation.
The issue, though, is that most colleges and universities excel at a narrow range of innovation, while leaving much of the heavy lifting and banal achievement to private industry (in the general sense), whether corporate or individual in scale of effort. Much of this effort is by its nature experiential (though not all of it) and requires individual, life-long learning to contribute to the ecosystem.
The degree farm approach has harmed us all.