More Than 40% of Student Borrowers Aren’t Making Payments

Philosophically, American universities are meant to 1) search for truth, 2) produce graduates who are educated about the most important findings and methods of the search for truth, 3) contribute to the general or local welfare in the process. Suggest to them that they are workforce training systems and you'll have a mess on your hands [0].

The private ones were doing this among the elite for hundreds of years, the public ones were meant to let the masses join the elite's party. Aside from specifically designed trade schools, neither are intended as (nor do they think of themselves as) servants of business needs for specific kinds of labor. That is why you see people required to take all kinds of "unnecessary" subjects like chemistry, physics, math, art, literature, philosophy, social sciences, etc. and even specialize in those things, regardless of whether they are relevant to career ambitions. And why this proposal is not tenable in the current system.

Part of doing this for the masses is being unselective. If public universities became more selective to decrease their dropout rates, it would be seen as a betrayal of their identities and the very purpose of public education. (For some reason people are a lot more tolerant of their children washing out then of their children getting rejected).

At the time, teenage/minimum wage was high enough in real terms were high and tuition was low enough (partly because public institutions had lower overhead, partly they had a lot more taxpayer support) that this was economically tenable. White collar employers found that college students were useful enough to put to work, even though their curriculum wasn't really designed at the employers' direction.

Even in computing. A philosophically pure Computer Science curriculum (and mine comes close) asks the question, "So we have this model of computation, and these machines that implement it. What does that mean? What can we do with it?" It does not ask the question "How do we best prepare workers for the IT departments of the big local employers?"

And this is why you get students learning things like theory of computation, fundamental algorithms, functional programming, operating systems, compilers, programming language theory and design, networking in the general rather than Cisco sense, etc. - things that re meant to be fundamental and timeless - instead of How To Contribute To Local BigCos Java/Win32 Codebases Right Now.

Maybe we've outlived the usefulness of this notion. It's less present in Europe, but in Germany at least the college liberal arts curriculum is simply shifted into high school and reserved for the academically inclined (Gymansium). It's not that they don't do it, they just do it differently.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/02/...

I'm not a fan of the financial sector but let's keep the facts straight here

On the other hand, a study conducted by the Department of Education, run by Education Secretary John King Jr, makes a lot of sense. and is hardly malicious at all. Department of Education wanting to know the effectiveness of their FAFSA loan program (and why or why not people are able to pay those loans back) is definitely a good thing.

Besides, all the loans are being handled by Sallie Mae (a private company with some Government support). So its Sallie Mae who is officially on the hook with regards to collections and such. The Department of Education is rather removed from the whole finances thing, as far as I'm aware.

So basically, you can assume a malicious force if the IRS or maybe even Sallie Mae began to conduct this sort of investigation. But the Department of Education? Collections isn't their thing. They're likely interested in the state of education, college readiness and the like.