Student Debt

     I wasn't real happy about the Feds using my tax money to pay off someone else's student debt.

     On the other hand, when the government makes student loan money readily available and makes student loan debt undischargable in bankruptcy, not expecting massive inflation in the price of a college education verges on insanity.  The cost went from something you could save up for and cover with part-time work (at least at non-elite schools) in my grandparents time* to a hard-but-attainable price when my siblings got their degrees in the 1970s and 80s -- and has zoomed up since, at an exponentially greater rate than inflation.  That's a lousy deal, and as badly as we need plumbers and air-conditioning techs, when you need a physicist, biologist or, yes, a philosopher instead, there is no alternative means of getting 'em.  They've got to be college-educated and it's probably better if they're not laboring under heavy debt, smuggling fusion theory, designer marmosets or Platonic discourse under the table to make ends meet.

     But I type all that without the slightest idea how to fix it.  Uncle Sam picking up the well-padded tab only rewards bad behavior at public expense, and is one of those things that becomes a handy campaign issue pro and con instead of a lasting solution.
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* Two BAs and an MA between them and almost a PhD, but apparently his advisor hated my maternal grandfather's PhD thesis and no one knows why, not even the aunt who retyped portions of it for him in the late 1930s but could never remember it in detail.