State universities — the bulk of public universities in the nation — are already subject to control by state legislatures. The problem is that this central planning capability is not in practice used to improve education and its affordability, but rather to enrich and empower the university staff (and occasionally faculty) as they siphon off public funds, loans, fees and tuition, in a classic illustration of the principal-agent problem. Even the retirement systems seek overtly political ends with their investments.

Unwinding this debacle will involve dealing with the entire university's staff, who will be dead set against it, and who will have contracts that are in place to protect them. The legislators who do so will face extensive public criticism from these highly paid, highly motivated people, who wish to protect their pay. Good luck with that!

(Private universities should of course be free to do as they wish in this regard, because who do you think you are; mind your own businesses.)

> Private universities should of course be free to do as they wish in this regard, because who do you think you are; mind your own businesses.

Thanks for the chuckle.

> Unwinding this debacle will involve dealing with the entire university's staff, who will be dead set against it, and who will have contracts that are in place to protect them. The legislators who do so will face extensive public criticism from these highly paid, highly motivated people, who wish to protect their pay. Good luck with that!

I reject the framing that this system is promoted or even protected by university staff. It is of course in their interests to keep it largely intact but the true system facilitators have been in place for centuries perhaps with different names and agendas.

One thing that has been discussed here is removing government backed loans. Doing so would perhaps reduce overall population exposure to higher education. I think the trend of expanding costs of education will continue without government help via positive feedback loop from parental investment and other society wide changes happening today.

So in essence university value is being justified each day without a thought of future consequences. To that end the government may act for increasing government sponsorship loan forgiveness where you work off your loans at a discount rather than a dead stop bailout of loans that may never be repaid in a lifetime. The government could probably make a variety of optional part time/full time 'loan forgiveness' programs for the public good. Unfortunately assigning the public good would probably be too hard to decipher in a bipartisan manner.