Determining a cause and attributing responsibility are not the same. One can argue that just about everybody is responsible:
- Government giving special laws that are able to be abused.
- Lenders utilizing said laws to maximize their personal benefit
- Universities raising costs far outside of any notion of need
- Students taking out loans they can't repay
- Parents/schools encouraging students to go to college, even for low value degrees
- Employers requiring degrees for jobs that don't really require them.
And while each of these can be attacked, they can be just as easily defended. When you try to attribute blame, it's going to end up being horribly subjective and more like to turn into a witch hunt than anything else. And it's also going to be incredibly partisan. For instance people who chose to not attend university would completely understandably prefer to blame students. Students who went to university would probably prefer to blame universities or lenders. Who's right? There's no objective answer.
What is clear is the cause of the problem -- students are taking out loans that will not be able to be reasonably paid back. And so too are there plenty of solutions. Blame plays no part other than to divide people.
Sure--I read the parent comment. I have no doubt there will always be someone else people blame when liberal policies fail, but lenders, universities, students, parents, and employers acting rationally in their own self-interest is not some strange unforeseeable possibility.
We have to be able to acknowledge when bad ideas don't work well. This is one of those times.
Ah okay! I must have misunderstood you. The implication (to me) of seeking to attribute blame was the typical game of trying to pick the most apparently malevolent actor, not actually thinking about why we failed to foresee quite foreseeable consequences in the past. I'd completely agree that trying to figure out why we didn't foresee this (to help us prevent making such mistakes in the future) would be very helpful.
- Government giving special laws that are able to be abused.
- Lenders utilizing said laws to maximize their personal benefit
- Universities raising costs far outside of any notion of need
- Students taking out loans they can't repay
- Parents/schools encouraging students to go to college, even for low value degrees
- Employers requiring degrees for jobs that don't really require them.
And while each of these can be attacked, they can be just as easily defended. When you try to attribute blame, it's going to end up being horribly subjective and more like to turn into a witch hunt than anything else. And it's also going to be incredibly partisan. For instance people who chose to not attend university would completely understandably prefer to blame students. Students who went to university would probably prefer to blame universities or lenders. Who's right? There's no objective answer.
What is clear is the cause of the problem -- students are taking out loans that will not be able to be reasonably paid back. And so too are there plenty of solutions. Blame plays no part other than to divide people.