Colleges should pay to have student debt canceled

One of the issues Occupy took up was student debt. Occupy Cincinnati once had a march about this issue, and we were actually attacked during it.

These days, I don't expect anything productive to be done on this or any other matter, given the sorry state of our political system. To give you an idea of how bad things are, in one recent local election, the supposedly most progressive of the 3 candidates wanted to bring back the draft. Today's so-called progressives have become the war hawks that real progressives have long fought against.

I've long supported canceling student debt, but not long ago, some folks actually raised a good argument against it. While debt would be canceled for people who went to college, what about those who never had the chance to go to college? What do they get from canceling student debt?

That's a fair point, but it doesn't make college debt any less burdensome. Another drawback of canceling student debt is that all of us taxpayers would be on the hook for it. So here's my solution: Make colleges pay for it. This would apply to public and private colleges alike, so not all of it would be shouldered by taxpayers.

Think of this as a warranty. For decades, I've said that schools should be subject to warranties that guarantee the quality of the education they offer. If a school doesn't provide an education that allows one to make enough money to pay off their debt, whose fault is that? Is it my fault we have such shitty schools?

Many of our schools are run by some bad, bad people, and there's new evidence emerging all the time they'd rather teach hatred of the Bill of Rights than useful academic material. Our colleges bash the principles America is supposed to be run on, and they ought to pay a price just for that. I hope that with the decline of our colleges just in this decade, society can lift the violent taboo against not attending college.