Student loans: Out of the mouths of babes Economist.com An article about the problems with student debt in America. - Students have to incur huge debts, even if they are headed towards public-service professions like public law or work for NGOs that don't have huge wages to correspond with their needed education. This encourages students to prostitute themselves to te highest bidding corporation after graduation and limits the role of morality and interest in choosing who you will work for, ultimately limiting happiness. - Government is reducing the availability of loans. We cannot trust the government to make loans available and we can trust them more to do something that won't cost them a penny: regulate to cap what schools can charge. - Government is limiting who can get loans. Government uses the loan program to choose what programs people should be persuing. They use the programs to guide people into courses of study that are considered to be economically desirable, like maths, sciences, and foreign languages. Arts programs will thus become the preserve of the rich. - Not capping the rates that schools can charge has allowed them to baloon in recent years and this has lead to schools competing on frivolities like the school masseus instead of educational merit. When education is treated like a business, then schools waste money on things like advertising instead of focusing on academics.