For too many years, we had a situation where young students were all expected to go to college. The trades were looked down upon and few parents wanted their children to become plumbers or electricians. Many weren't motivated and probably shouldn't have been in college in the first place, so after a year or two, dropped out.
Now with all the attention on costs and loans, hopefully people will make a lot smarter choices about what fields of study to go into. We encouraged people to follow their dreams on schools and majors, with no tempering of the ramifications of borrowing tens of thousands of dollars for a degree in fields that are generally low paying. Not to mention, those who struggle to find a decent paying job with their degrees, then decide they need to borrow even more $$$ to get a Masters degree in that same field.
Why it took this long for people to figure out kind of baffles me because with the plethora on information on the internet, it is easy to determine a) the cost of attending any specific institution, and b) how much potential earning power there is in any field. With that information, determining the ROI on taking out significant loans should be understandable by anyone bright enough to go to college in the first place. The desire by any student to attend any college in the country they want, and take the major of their choice, regardless of cost and ROI is not sustainable for the vast majority of people.
While the colleges deserve some amount of blame for the increases in costs, as long as students were willing to borrow more and more, and the lenders, including the government, were willing to keep giving it out, I'm not surprised that the colleges would keep raising tuitions etc. as long as people kept paying it. With enrollments dropping, I imagine they will start to go the other way.
I think you will see more students decide to commute from home to a nearby school, and choose majors that justify the costs.
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