$hould We Worry About $tudent Loan Debt? Nope, Here’$ Why

I like following what’s happening in education. I’ve worked for one real school (a state university) and three private ones that closed after self-induced waves of  mismanagement and greed-driven impropriety. But America is all about choice – here, you get the choice to watch as your campus gets sold off to appease banks and investors.

That’s an excellent lesson right there, a real teachable moment about the economics of privatization.

This morning I read an article headlined Fewer Than Half Of American Students Are Ready For College. That seems pretty bad, no? But a few stories down, just below the piece on lesbians having more orgasms than straight women, was the article Nine Charts Showing America’s Coming Student Loan Apocalypse.

And suddenly everything made sense to me. We all know that colleges are getting ridiculously expensive to attend. And this drives student debt into the stratosphere. So when we read that less than half of American kids are ready for college, should we get bummed out?

Nope. Here’s why.

Fewer kids being ready for college means fewer will attend. This saps the demand for colleges. With far fewer kids demanding college educations, the price will fall. Pretty soon top-notch schools will be competing against Wasted State by offering a B.S in Electrical Engineering for $1,500 per year, just to fill seats. And over time the student loan burden will fall.

So we should trust the Free Market – it corrects itself every time. And this’ll work a lot better than Mitch McConnell’s Think Smaller plan, where your kid skips attending Harvard, enrolls in a cheap school, and then works in fast food when he can’t find a job.

But no worries, the free market is working and things are happening. At least one company out there gets it. This supermarket is having a sale on the school supplies that really matter:

It’s all good, yo.