Student Loans

The current debate in Congress on the doubling of student loan interest rates doesn't address the core problem. The real issue is the outrageous tuition that greedy colleges charge. Low-interest federally subsided loans have only fueled tuition increases over the past half century. The rise in tuition in far greater than the general inflation rate. There's a nice summary in Salon. Here is a succinct description of what has happened:

a culture was created where unscrupulous colleges and universities were able to raise tuition costs aggressively, safe in their knowledge that the banks would provide any loans to any students pursuing any degree programs for any reason, without regard to cost, future job prospects or even (in many cases) the realistic expectation that the loan might be repaid.