On the “Is this good politics?” question – parents of indebted kids might want their kids not to be indebted, so it’s not just the kids who’d be catered to here.
On the “Is this good policy?” question – Everything that you say in your “What is to be done?” section suggests that it is in fact good, but incomplete policy. It isn’t just the “cost structure of tertiary education” that has to be fixed; rather, the whole disgusting tertiary pseudo-educational system has to be done away with, and the cancelling of all pseudo-educational debts would naturally accompany the elimination of this obscene ritual.
Nobody’s being educated; people are forced to waste years doing pointless (at least for them) busy-work in order to acquire the credentials that they need in order to begin doing the jobs that they could have started doing just as well at age 16. So, people are rightly disgusted at the idea that they have to pay money to do what they should have been paid money for doing.
‘At some point "more education" must carry a responsibility - the responsibility to pay back society.’ – Calling abuse “education” doesn’t make it education, and while education might be the sort of thing that one should pay for (Socrates disagrees, by the way), abuse isn’t. People don’t have any responsibility to “pay back society” (in other words, the rulers of society) for years of humiliation and boredom.
On the “Is this good politics?” question – parents of indebted kids might want their kids not to be indebted, so it’s not just the kids who’d be catered to here.
On the “Is this good policy?” question – Everything that you say in your “What is to be done?” section suggests that it is in fact good, but incomplete policy. It isn’t just the “cost structure of tertiary education” that has to be fixed; rather, the whole disgusting tertiary pseudo-educational system has to be done away with, and the cancelling of all pseudo-educational debts would naturally accompany the elimination of this obscene ritual.
Nobody’s being educated; people are forced to waste years doing pointless (at least for them) busy-work in order to acquire the credentials that they need in order to begin doing the jobs that they could have started doing just as well at age 16. So, people are rightly disgusted at the idea that they have to pay money to do what they should have been paid money for doing.
‘At some point "more education" must carry a responsibility - the responsibility to pay back society.’ – Calling abuse “education” doesn’t make it education, and while education might be the sort of thing that one should pay for (Socrates disagrees, by the way), abuse isn’t. People don’t have any responsibility to “pay back society” (in other words, the rulers of society) for years of humiliation and boredom.