My old friend, Jesse, sent me a series of instant messages the other day – referencing an old thread on student loans:

I was just reading your post from a few weeks ago about student loan debt. I wanted to share my view on this with you. You may recall, over the past year I have been serving as the student trustee on my university’s board of trustees: http://www.siu.edu/bot/

I would like to see a few things happen. First… Differential tuition. Charge students the cost of their individualized education. I am in the engineering school, which is one of the most expensive pieces of my institution. My professors cost almost 2x as much as some other departments do… and my lab equipment is really expensive as well. I should be pay proportionaly more than someone that it is english or education or social work (which are at the other end of the cost spectrum). Basically, this balances itself out because people that cost more to educate will generally make more when they graduate.

Then… Do away with the grant system and take all the money from it and fully subsidize loans for all students. If you’re going to college and you need money… You get a loan interest free. I have a philosophical problem with grants as they are currently implemented. Your education is about you… Not your parents… So i have a problem with telling one kid that his parents made too much money for him or her to get any help and another that since his parents are poor he gets to go to college for free.

Now… The argument for the current method is because poorer communities don’t have as much money in their public schools so the education is not as good. But i’d rather not just cover up the problem… Instead let’s fix it by detaching property taxes from school revenue. Anyway… I’ve done a lot of research and ran numbers and planned… This is my idea of what would make the system fairer and equitable for all. The other major flaw with the grant system is that with the divorce rate as high as it is… The numbers don’t calculate right with who is poor and who isn’t…