Seven Ways to Combat the Student Debt Crisis

6. Taxpayers: fund public higher education.  Fund it well.

You’re not paying for someone else’s child to go to college; you’re paying to educate the people who will one day be building your bridges and researching your drugs and fixing the environment you screwed up and, frankly, wiping your butt in the nursing home.  Don’t you want them to be good at it?

Go ahead and be completely and totally selfish, and fund their education now.

7. Everybody: fix primary and secondary education.

Fix it right the actual heck now.

Fix the racism.  Fix the classism.  Fix the way the system perpetuates poverty and injustice.  Fix the time-in-grade model, fix the overstuffed, undersupplied classrooms, fix the teacher education, and fix the funding.

Stop shifting more and more costs to current parents by calling them “supply fees.”  Stop shifting more and more of the work to parents by making schools entirely dependent on “volunteers.”

Stop crowding more kids than a teacher can handle into classrooms.  Stop taking resources out of them.

Make a high school degree meaningful again, and make it genuinely for everybody.

Public education is a public good that the public should pay for.  Start doing it.