Robert Reich hits on one of my pet obsessions: The job lock caused by student loans. "Several of my students who will graduate next week," he writes, "tell me they would have liked to go into social work or into the non-profit sector or provide legal services to the poor. One had his heart set on becoming a painter. Another became passionate about archeology and had wanted to go on a dig in the Sahara. But they can’t do any of these things because they have tens of thousands of dollars of debt. They need jobs that pay the rent while they repay their loans."
Our increasing reliance on loans as a primary funding source for college has nasty side effects, forcing lower-income students to go into more-renumerative professions in order to pay off debt that, mind you, was originally granted so they could go to college and figure out what they wanted to do for the rest of their lives. Anything, it turns out, as long as they can pay the government back.
Reich has a better idea: "Make repayment of government-subsidized loans depend on how much money [graduates] earn. Say that everyone has to pay ten percent of their income for the first ten years of their full-time work. And then the loans are considered paid off. My student who's landed that private-equity job would pay ten percent of his income for ten years, which would be a hefty sum. My students who go into social work or become artists would pay ten percent of theirs, which would be far less."
