As money dries up, some loans aren't going to happen. It is dangerous territory to consider reductions in student loans, but, there is a way to make the student loan money work more efficiently while not cutting off education to anyone--

Measure placement rates, and redline the bottom 5% of programs, by total students in school and major, so that entering freshman are told, before they pick a school and major, that federal loans will not be made available for that major, that year.

I realize some majors do not connect people to the job market directly. You would have "Placed into career", "placed into grad school", and "not placed".

Like history majors. Maybe it's easy to get a job with a history major from yale, but not some state school in Iowa. Well, someone with their heart set on working with history will see the placements rates, and notice that they can't get funding to go to Iowa anyway, can choose instead the school that will lead to gainful employment.

The beauty of this system is multifaceted-- once you redline a major, you cut off the supply of students: less students competing for the available jobs = more students get jobs = redlining self-corrects! Also, it might just help colleges serve students better.

Also, If the number of students in redlining programs declines as predicted, slowly more programs will be redlined and killed dynamically from year-to-year.

consider a ficticious would with 100 students per school, and 2 colleges with 10 majors, and 5 students in each major(50 students per each college). The you measure the placement rate and redline one program.

year one: baseline. 5 students each major, 50 students each school

year five: 1 major at School A redlined. School A's reputation declines. only 1 student enters the redline major. only 40 students choose school A, 60 flood school B. meanwhile, since 1% of the student body is not enough to get redlined, school B's weakest program earns the redline.

year three, the students are back to 50/50, as each school has one redlined program. Only 1 student enter each redlined program, 2% is not enough, so one more program gets redlined. meanhwhile, the supply of workers for the program redlined in year one has dried up, so it comes off the red list.

This of course was an oversimplification, and the real world system will have lag, but you get the picture. The students, and the loans, chase the jobs.

Now, I understand the college is about more than preparation for a job, and even engineers should be forced to take classic lit classes, blah blah blah. But the government's interests lie making loans where the chances of repayment are high, and, I daresay colleges can enrich and prepare people for jobs at the same time, and it's immoral to allow someone to aquire a debt that will be systematically difficult to repay in the name of "enrichment".

I am not sure how colleges will adjust when federal student loans are redlined. Maybe majors will get axed, maybe colleges will develop more sophisticated career placement assistence systems and alliances with local businesses, but I see all these things as positives. Because nearly all students depend on student loans, redlining a mere 5% should be enough to redirect students into majors with better chances of career placement.

There are, of course, many other ideas that can be implemented alongside this one. However those can be discussed on a different thread.

In an orderly and slowly changing system, there is probably a tendency for this sort of thing to happen by the voluntary choice of students since they can reasonably well predict their chances of placement some four years hence. However, our society has become one in which the need for people in given fields varies wildly and unpredictably. Thus, the probability that a student who chooses a promising field in his freshman year will still be pursuing a job in that field with a high probability of placement is very small. Thus, an annual re-redlining of fields would be highly disruptive. Suppose, for instance, that somebody had entered that state school in Iowa two years ago, with a curriculum optimized around the production of corn ethanol. It is obvious, now, that there would be little need for that student's services when he graduated two years hence. If his field is redlined, it leaves him in a difficult position. Should he salvage as much of his education as possible and pursue a degree in bourbon production (I know there is none such, but this is a fanciful sketch) or should he start over? This would be a tough plan to administer without leaving many students with larger loans to repay than might otherwise have been the case.

Note: the above illustration is not wholly accurate since, in most cases, the first two years of college consists largely of classes shared by most students, regardless of major. I'm just trying to make a general point - and tease a little bit about gasohol.

To clarify-- once a student is college, he can keep getting loans, or switch majors, as long as it is not to a major that is currently redlined.

Meanwhile, I disagree with your premise that most students enter college pursuing a major that will lead to job placement. Many switch majors, and many leave with debts that they are finding increasingly difficult to pay back.

"I disagree with your premise that most students enter college pursuing a major that will lead to job placement."

I didn't say they do. I said that, if the environment changed more slowly (as was the case when I was in college in the early '50s) they could (and did). Of course, there wasn't any student loan program in those days either.

The GI bill was filling the nation's colleges with soldiers. Student loans would have been silly, there wasn't enough seats in the classrooms. The GI bill could be seen as more a grant than a loan I suppose, but there was cartainly federal money being pumped into education.

At any rate, today it seems we have too many young people taking on debt burdens they cannot repay, delaying marriage and homeownership, amongst other things. Also, the government's expenses rise the longer they have to wait for loan money to be repaid.

The main effect of the redline, I think, would be the elimination of ineffective programs, and the increase of job placement assistance at colleges for their graduates. I have trouble seeing how the negatives would outway the positives.

The odd thing is that, in my class and field (Aeronautical Engineering), which had maybe 35 students, I don't remember anybody who claimed to have been in either WW2 or the Korean War, except one foreign student I roomed with one year who was in the Greek underground in WW2. I would have expected, at least, that former Air Force people would have shown up.

historical note: Aeronautical engineering,centered on airplanes, was the precursor to Aerospace engineering. My first job happened to be working on the Navajo, our first supersonic intercontinental cruise missile and my second job, working on Vanguard, which was planned (we had some unfortunate hiccups and the Von Braun team got the honor) to be our first satellite launcher. So, Aerospace engineering departments sprung up right after I graduated, incorporating the former Aeronautical departments.