Student loans: I owe a bunch. While alone, in dark private places, I've often cursed the American system of virtual debt-slavery through student loans. I owe a lot. Too much. And salaries in my field are dropping. This editorial is right on the money: "The pre-bankrupting of America's best and brightest, the young men and women who attend private colleges and public universities, is one of our nation's enduring, quiet scandals." It goes on:

Average tuition and fees at a private college or university is $18,000 and rising at twice the inflation rate. Meanwhile, what students call "real" financial aid--grants and scholarships, not loans--keeps falling. The result is two-fold. The Rand Corporation estimates that 6 million Americans will be "priced out of the system" over the next two decades. And for those who bite the bullet, more students than ever (46 percent in 1990, 70 percent in 2000) end up taking out college loans.... College tuition is free or nominal in most industrialized, and many Third World, countries [look at Canada, for example]. The United States' insistence that students assume huge debts to pay for their college education is unusual enough that the Chinese government included it in its 2001 report of American human rights violations. Eliminating the debt racket wouldn't be difficult. Calling off the invasion of Iraq, for instance, would save an estimated $200 billion---that's six years of fiscally emancipated youth right there. Eliminating last year's $1.5 trillion tax cut--money that would have gone to rich people who won't miss it--would pay off everyone's student loans for the next 50 years.

There is a disease in the American system: an attitude that students are merely leeches who derive profit from their educations and hence must pay through the nose for what they walk away with. Not so in most other places. Here in Canada there is an absurd amount of money for students. And the tuition is cheap to begin with. And there's a huge social movement to make it lower! Grad students in Germany get paid like real engineers. It's staggering. The author of the above editorial might also have noted that Canadian education is shooting up in the ratings while US schools are plummetting. On one day I've never heard of the University of Alberta, and then the next day I read that its ranked #11 in North America. I think they might know what they're doing here with education.