Students graduate tens of thousands of dollars in debt, and are saddled with this burden for years to come. Moreover, college life very often makes it too easy to postpone personal maturity. There is rapidly growing grassroots support for getting government out of primary and secondary education. Evidence of this may be seen in the popularity of the school choice and home school movements. Indeed, there is now a superb organization called the Separation of School and State Alliance.
Similar attention needs to be paid to eliminating the government's role in higher education.
Not only will costs decrease when colleges are faced with competing in the educational marketplace. Quality will increase, because students will be pay real money and, hence, demand real courses. So many of the nauseating examples of political correctness we hear about are perpetrated by people who are absolved of ever having to compete in order to eat. In the absence of student loans, it may take a little longer for many students to complete a four-year degree. If they take ten credits a semester instead of 15, because they are working to get through school, they may graduate at 25 rather than 22.