Important to remember, in many cases it was a goal, not a side effect. When someone lived out their life and they’re kinda miserable and unfulfilled, they might justifiably hate our world, in a sense. There’s really only one way to take revenge on it, and that’s to perpetuate and worsen the shittiness so that nobody can hope to escape it.

Misery loves company, or so the saying goes.

Says a lot about the people that absolutely don’t want for student debt to be cleared in the USA because they had to clear it themself.

The worst part is that the student debt they paid off was a small portion of the debt that people cannot afford to pay off now because the same people defunded universities.

When I was a young kid a summer job at minimum wage could pay for a year of state college. By the time I attended a summer job paid for a semester. Now a summer job at the minimum wage will barely pay for books, since the minimum wage has stagnated and tuition goes up year after year.

There’s some truth here but rocketing university costs are a little more complex than that.

I don't think it's particularly complex.

They captured state houses and gutted state budgets for direct funding to universities. Simultaneously, democrats tried to make up the difference at the national level by pushing for and getting pell grants, which are dedicated grant funds. This means there's a dedicated amount of federal funds on the table every year, which mitigates against the market forces that would otherwise push tuition prices back down.

Students are then encouraged to take personal loans to cover the manufactured shortfall. Students can't discharge this in bankruptcy, which encourages bad lending practices.

Almost all of this is very normal cause and effect with plenty of analogous historical examples, so even if we the idiot people don't get it, you can be pretty sure that our highly educated and wealthy elected officials knew exactly what would happen.

If this were all too confusing or complex to know the outcome, then at least some of the time we'd see benefit randomly go to the individual. But it doesn't, ever.

I don't think it's particularly complex.

I'm trying to be polite here so I apologize if this seems overly blunt. I think calling it "not particularly complex" is pretty striking. We are talking about a network of around 7000 schools (a little over 1000 CC's and over 5000 4-year universities, not including trade schools) consisting of public, private, and religious institutions across 50 states with their own sets of laws. There is nothing simple about it.

We are both speaking in generalities so I'm going to link a few secondary sources as well as a primary source on this.

1
2 - a Forbes piece discussing the above
3 - Solid piece by
4 - A nice short piece from NPR about a decade ago which gives us some context about the post-war period's massive influence on how colleges developed and expanded

I could keep just dumping links but I think those 3 are a good start. Reduced state funding absolutely contributes to the problem in a large way. There's no attempt here to downplay that, and that reduced funding is largely done by Republicans, as they tend to do with any education funding. But to say that is far and away the biggest driver is to over-simplify the issue and to ignore decades of other trends, such as rising operating costs, ballooning investments to be more attractive without a sustainable plan for maintaining facilities/programs (HUGE issue at private universities in particular), the huge push by the federal government to get people into schools no matter what predatory loans they got 17 and 18 year old's to sign (everyone should have access and the federal government should help but we let wolves in with the sheep with the way we structured it), and so many other factors contribute to this issue.