[logicalmonster]

I don't know exactly how Sweden works and don't have the basis to make a comparison with the American system. But I believe that many countries emphasize some kind of competitive exams for college entry and have far fewer good college spots than are available in America? Is that the case? Perhaps there's some significant differences in the overall system that just wouldn't work in America that drastically changes the financial incentives.

But speaking strictly about America, is it possible that dramatically expanding access to cheap educational loans may have some unintended negative consequences?

For instance, you could argue that the price of education in the US has continued to increase even as more and more funding assistance became available. Some observers see it as colleges taking advantage of society's goodwill and just continuously expanding their administrations and spending as students attain more access to credit. Let's conduct a thought-experiment: if society offered students 100K free per year for the sake of education, is it any doubt that college prices would find a way to rise to around that amount soon after?

As another consequence, maybe unserious people are financially incentivized to go to college to take nearly useless degrees. Is it a good thing for society to perpetuate this system of debt? Keep in mind that we live in an Instant Gratification society, and many people go to school purely for the fun social experience. Kids are basically pressured to take on tens of thousands of dollars (or more) in debt just to live life on easy mode for a few years and many people don't take actually useful degrees that are hard (some kind of engineering for instance) but many people take degrees with truly marginal or even negative social value. Would expanding access to credit not just exacerbate this?