[ebiester]

So.. We make it so that only people likely to pay the loan back get student loans. Then, we watch as the actuaries figure out that students frompoor families are the ones who disproportionately pay their loans (since they don't have the same familial support during and after college.)

So, poor students are disproportionately denied loans, and we continue to see generational wealth inequality expand.

There are no great solutions, and there are tradeoffs everywhere. However, leaving it to the market seems immoral too.

[dnautics]

why is 'leaving it to the market' immoral? If you think the poor should be granted preferential financial treatment, then you should reach into your own pocket and help pay for them. Or help scholarship funds raise money. Or at least pressure your alma mater to set aside some funds for the economically underprivileged. If you don't do any of the above, then you don't really believe in it, do you?

It's also kind of insulting for you to assume 'the poor are the ones who won't be able to pay back'. In my experience (and it's possible that I had a unique college experience) it was the students who came from tougher backgrounds that buckled down, didn't get stupid degrees, or even if they did, managed to pull decent, well-paying jobs out of college, because they used their education, and it was the upper class students that were loafers or chose their degrees in a silly fashion, so in a way, the good education of the less privileged was subsidized by the poor choices of the rich.

[dnautics]

should clarify, my 'unique college experience' was that I went to a fairly expensive private research university in the US; I strongly suspect that the waste of time in college cuts across socioeconomic lines at many big box state schools.

[Jach]

> ... generational wealth inequality expand.

People automatically assume economic inequality is bad, though here's an argument for its merits: http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html

I'm more concerned about the wealth floor in a society going down, which is at odds with the general trend over the past centuries of it going up, even if not at the same rate as the wealth ceiling.

[ebiester]

I'm not worried about economic inequality in and of itself, but rather a lack of class mobility.