The thrust of our colleagues’ column on handling the problem of outstanding student debt through institutional accountability, borrowing limits, and extension of income-based repayment is only partially responsive to the causes of the student debt crisis. The central problem is that as demand for higher education increased, state support for public higher education declined. This put the private market for higher education at a distinct advantage, allowing the exploitation of some students by low-quality for-profit providers, and the exploitation of others via excessively high prices conflated with better quality. As a result, over time, a larger and more diverse population of students was pushed to take on federal student loans in order to finance their increasingly extensive and expensive postsecondary education. Labor market credentialization is a key factor driving increased demand for college. It is no longer possible to reliably obtain stable labor market status without at least some form of higher education. Employers have shifted the cost of training and qualifying onto workers, to be paid for with student debt. As demand for higher education credentials filtered to an increasingly nontraditional population, in terms of age, race, and family background, reliance on debt shifted from a marginal experience to a central one. While student debt used to be primarily held by graduates of expensive and elite professional programs, it is now held by a much broader group of people, including those who did not complete or even attend college. With that shifting identity came shifting economics: having student debt was once a mark of relative privilege; now it is a mark of disadvantage. Correspondingly, the perceived “pathologies” of non-repayment, default, and other forms of credit market distress have become more prevalent. Looney and Yannelis focus on one aspect of credentialization: the expansion of for-profit institutions. Public institutions have long been constrained by inadequate levels of funding, even before the Great Recession. This led them to be less nimble at serving historically underserved populations, but over time those funding cuts pushed them to become increasingly entrepreneurial—even adopting practices for which the for-profit colleges are rightly criticized. It is a bit ironic that the authors refer to “an emerging empirical consensus . . . that institutions themselves are responsible for the success or failure of their students—not the demographics or socioeconomic status of their students” without acknowledging the role of structural changes in the economics of higher education. Their claim is without much merit. Of the four studies they cite to buttress it, only the paper by Zimmerman (2014) even purports to establish a causal relationship between higher education and student outcomes. And, contrary to the way the authors characterize that study, it does not document heterogeneity among institutions, since it focuses on admission to a single institution. One study the authors cite elsewhere, Hickman and Mountjoy (2020), actually demonstrates the opposite—homogeneity among the causal effects of admission to a range of institutions in Texas, taking selection into account. The crucial fact of the student debt

中文翻译：

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学生债务危机的有效治疗需要准确的诊断

我们同事关于通过机构问责、借款限制和延长基于收入的还款来处理未偿还学生债务问题的专栏的主旨只是部分回应了学生债务危机的原因。核心问题是，随着高等教育需求的增加，国家对公立高等教育的支持下降。这使得私立高等教育市场具有明显的优势，允许低质量的营利性提供者剥削一些学生，并通过过高的价格剥削其他学生，但质量更好。结果，随着时间的推移，越来越多的学生被迫接受联邦学生贷款，以资助他们日益广泛和昂贵的高等教育。劳动力市场认证是推动大学需求增加的关键因素。如果没有至少某种形式的高等教育，就不可能可靠地获得稳定的劳动力市场地位。雇主已将培训和资格认证的成本转移到工人身上，并用学生债务来支付。随着对高等教育证书的需求渗透到越来越非传统的人口中，在年龄、种族和家庭背景方面，对债务的依赖从边缘经历转变为核心经历。虽然学生债务过去主要由昂贵和精英专业课程的毕业生持有，但现在由更广泛的人群持有，包括那些没有完成甚至没有上过大学的人。身份的转变带来了经济的转变：学生债务曾经是相对特权的标志；现在它是劣势的标志。相应地，不还款、违约和其他形式的信贷市场困境的感知“病态”变得更加普遍。Looney 和 Yannelis 专注于认证的一个方面：营利性机构的扩张。公共机构长期以来一直受到资金不足的限制，甚至在大萧条之前也是如此。这导致他们在为历史上服务不足的人群提供服务时不那么灵活，但随着时间的推移，这些资金削减促使他们变得越来越具有创业精神——甚至采用了营利性大学受到正确批评的做法。作者提到“一种新兴的经验共识”，这有点讽刺。. . 机构本身对学生的成功或失败负责，而不是学生的人口统计或社会经济地位”，而没有承认结构性变化在高等教育经济学中的作用。他们的主张没有多大根据。在他们引用的四项研究中，只有 Zimmerman (2014) 的论文甚至声称要在高等教育和学生成绩之间建立因果关系。而且，与作者描述该研究的方式相反，它没有记录机构之间的异质性，因为它侧重于对单一机构的录取。作者在别处引用的一项研究，Hickman 和 Mountjoy（2020 年），实际上表明了相反的情况——考虑到选择，德克萨斯州一系列机构录取的因果效应之间存在同质性。