Wheeling, West Virginia Correspondent — In my part of the country a lot of families borrowed heavily for degrees that never produced the jobs or the earnings they were promised. I know men who worked thirty years in a mill, got out with nothing, and then cosigned for a child who’s now carrying forty thousand dollars and working retail. That’s two generations losing the same bet in different clothes.

Universities raised prices because the loan money kept flowing and the signals about which programs actually paid off were weak to nonexistent. That model isn’t sustainable.

We need clear public data on outcomes by program, more genuine apprenticeships and shorter credentials, and a good deal less cultural stigma around technical and trade education. Not every useful adult life requires four years and a lawn. Pretending otherwise has left too many people with debt and disappointment and a quiet sense that they failed at something they never should have been sold.

Prescott Valley, Arizona Correspondent — Having taught, I watched the mission of higher education expand at the same time costs rose faster than wages for most families. Those two things are related, and the relationship runs in an uncomfortable direction: the expansion was funded by the price increase.

The model rests on an assumption that the earnings premium will cover the debt for the majority of graduates. For a considerable number of majors and students, that assumption no longer holds, and we’ve known it for some time.

Greater transparency on outcomes, real skin in the game for institutions, and respectable alternatives to the standard bachelor’s degree are all overdue. Prestige and value have been allowed to drift very far apart, and prestige is the one that markets itself.

Myrtle Beach, South Carolina Correspondent — I have an associate’s degree and I work in marketing. Plenty of people I know have bachelor’s degrees and earn the same or less, and a couple of them are still paying for the difference.

The current model pushes too many students into four-year programs that don’t match what employers are hiring for, financed by debt that’s nearly impossible to discharge. That combination is the problem. Either one alone would be survivable.

Shorter, cheaper, more targeted credentials need to become normal instead of second-class. Right now the price signal in higher education is broken, and the people who pay for that are eighteen years old and taking advice from adults who mean well.

Orange County, California Correspondent — I underwrite for a living, so let me put it in those terms. We’re originating a loan with no collateral, no underwriting standard, no assessment of the borrower’s capacity to repay, and no ability to discharge in bankruptcy. If a bank brought me that structure I’d assume somebody had lost a page.

The reason it functions at all is that the non-dischargeability substitutes for the underwriting. We’re not lending against the value of the degree. We’re lending against the borrower’s future wages regardless of whether the degree produced any.

California has a decent public system and it still costs more than it did, and the housing math on top of it means a graduate here needs a materially higher starting salary than the same graduate in Phoenix. Publish outcomes by program and institution. Put institutions on the hook for some share of the default. The moment a school has a position in the loan, the catalog will start to look different.

Gastonia, North Carolina Correspondent — When debt is easy to get and outcome data by program stays fuzzy, people make expensive bets that often don’t pay off. That’s not a moral failing on the borrower’s part. That’s what happens when you give somebody a menu with no prices.

Schools kept raising tuition because the money kept arriving. That arrangement can’t continue indefinitely, and the fact that it’s continued this long is mostly a measure of how patient parents are.

Better information on real returns and less snobbery about technical education are both overdue. My oldest is looking at a two-year program and I’ve caught myself apologizing about it to people, which tells you the stigma is real and that I’m not immune to it either.

Las Vegas, Nevada Correspondent — A product that costs more every year while the wage premium on a lot of majors goes sideways isn’t a temple. It’s a business with a federal lender bolted to the side.

Forbearance and the rumor of cancellation teach the next freshman to borrow against a future act of Congress. That’s moral hazard in a cap and gown, and it gets worse every year the rumor persists without resolving.

I hire people in a town that runs on shifts. Some degrees help. Some are an expensive way to postpone the question of skill. Sustainable would mean prices that track value, accreditation that actually kills a weak program instead of putting it on a watch list, and less automatic federal money for credentials that don’t travel.

I’m not anti-school. I’m anti-fiction. Publish the earnings by program and then we can talk about who should still get a federal note.

Jacksonville, Florida Correspondent — I’ve hired people with degrees who could write a paper and couldn’t stand a shift. I’ve also hired people out of state schools who can run a gate and a spreadsheet and who I’d promote tomorrow.

The model is sustainable for the institutions. It isn’t sustainable for the student who leaves with a number that outruns the job.

Publish outcomes. Tie lending to those outcomes. Stop treating a four-year residential product as the only respectable path, because the port needs mechanics, planners, welders, and people who can read a contract, and we can’t find enough of any of them.

We’re overproducing one kind of credential and starving the others, then acting surprised when the debt turns into a political movement. That movement is coming whether we reform or not. Reform first is cheaper.

Knoxville, Tennessee Correspondent — The university in my town is a gravity well. It does real research and it employs half the people I know. It also sells a lifestyle and a parking problem, and families treat the logo as insurance.

Insurance that expensive needs a better actuarial table. If half the programs can’t show a return a parent could explain at a kitchen table, those programs shouldn’t sit on a federal tap.

That isn’t cruelty. Cruelty is letting an eighteen-year-old sign a note she doesn’t understand for a credential the market already discounted, and then telling her the shortfall reflects on her.

Change the incentives and the catalogs will change. Keep the incentives and we’ll be back here in ten years with a bigger number and the same speech. I’d also say, because somebody at this table should: the county schools that feed that university have been cut three years running. We’re arguing about the top of the pipe.

Cheyenne, Wyoming Correspondent — Too much debt for too little skill.

Show the first-year earnings by major. Cut federal lending to programs that can’t show a number. Keep the trades and the degrees that still pay.

The brochure isn’t a plan. A plan is a figure a banker would accept. If the school won’t print it, that’s your answer.