George Rebane
Most well-read Americans know about the student loan scam that has been going on for at least a couple of decades. This is where colleges and university administrations lobby for ever more generous and easy to get student loans, and then increase their tuitions and fees to continue the financial burden on the students, so that they can circle the ‘student loan barn’ one more time. Everyone, save the students, know what these administrators have been doing, but no one seems to care until we get into a crisis such as the one we have now.
Today, the unpaid student debt stands at over $1.5T, and there is little chance that the lion’s share of it will be repaid. Why? Because many (most?) of the former students didn’t get the education required to get and hold a job that pays enough to pay off the loan and also make ends meet for the other necessaries of living. And that because many of them left school before getting a degree, and more of them got ‘pretend feel-good’ (PFG) degrees. The latter were concocted by college administrations to cynically take advantage of the nation’s politically correctness plague and attract hordes of the unqualified for dealing with and benefitting from real academic fields that teach skill sets valuable to employers not spending other people’s monies.
With the often-laughable curricula underlying such PFG degrees, droves of otherwise unqualified students were admitted to colleges and universities across the land. Most all of them took out student loans for which fogging a mirror was the main qualification. The college kahunas promptly raised tuitions and fees, and the money poured in to hire all kinds of people to administer the ‘…ility’ and ‘…ivity’ programs and projects – racial diversity, gender equality, ethnic inclusivity, historical sensitivity, … .
But recently the news about college graduates with PFG degrees has gotten out, and employers are not hiring them for what they supposedly learned in school – ‘Would you like fries with that?’ wound up for many as Plan B. So during the last six years we have seen college enrollments drop (here), and it’s not clear whether the administrators, who now outnumber the institutions’ academics, will offer more or fewer PFG courses of study to attract the declining cohort of those planning to continue their education after high school.
No matter what the future admittance policies will be, student loans – most offered by government (i.e. you and me) – are here to stay. So here’s the Rebane Doctrine solution to the student loan crisis – simply put, require the admitting universities and colleges to guarantee their students’ loans. This will have at least two salutary effects. It will again raise admission standards to levels more in line with the intellectual demands of real academia, and it will serve to prune the course catalogue of gratuitous PFG degree programs (and also tune up their other academic offerings for success in the jobs markets). Universities will then have a vested interest in admitting qualified students and then teaching them skillsets valued by society. Simply pass legislation that requires schools receiving federal funding of any kind to co-sign their students’ loan agreements. A corollary benefit will be the reduction of administrative staffing levels, especially those dealing with all the ‘… ilities’ and ‘…ivities’ programs and attitudes that have so changed the face of our schools of higher education.
rebanesruminations.com 
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