Every industrialized nation recognizes that to remain competitive, it must have an educated population and therefore invest heavily in higher education. Our system of supporting higher education has caused us to push students away from studying mathematics and science, left us facing a debt bubble and has become a drain on economic recovery.

Perhaps for fear that the government would waste money if it directly funded higher education, or perhaps to put more government money into the hands of private lenders, the federal government decided higher education would be best supported through a system of subsidizing student loans.

This seems like a good idea. This system puts students, and therefore the market, in charge of what programs universities make available and not just bureaucrats. For sure, large student loans have allowed for the growth of colleges. In the past, college was reserved for elite students and the wealthy. Now almost anyone can find a college that will accept them as long as they can pay, and with Uncle Sam co-signing the loan, they most certainly can.

The competition between schools for these bundles of cash is fierce. Sadly, they are not competing by having better programs, but instead better dorms, sports teams and recreational facilities. The cost of this competition is adding to the cost of tuition, and since student loans are given out like candy, it doesn’t look like the increases in tuition will end any time soon. This increase in tuition affects all students, even those not taking out loans.

The student loan program is a poorly conceived investment which demonstrates the ills of crony capitalism. It loans money to people for degrees that don’t provide the salaries needed to pay back the loans taken out. Loans are to be investments, and the government is subsidizing these loans based on the idea that our economy needs these graduates.

Therefore, student loans should at least only be given in amounts that a graduate could reasonably be expected to pay back, and at most, only to students seeking degrees our economy needs. Since that isn’t happening, perhaps because it would interfere with the “free market,” we are investing in loans that can’t be paid back for degrees our economy doesn’t need.

At present, student loan debt has reached $1 trillion. Interest on that debt is much like tax money going to a bridge to nowhere. It hurts our economy as it provides no real value.

Former students and the government must be spending upward of $85 billion a year to service the interest alone on these debts. Imagine what that money could be doing for our economy if it were being used by those former students in their own communities, or even as tax money going directly into public universities.

We can whine that these students shouldn’t have taken out these loans, but we must remember that, as taxpayers, we have co-signed them. The borrowers just didn’t do this to themselves; we’ve done this to ourselves. These loans are nearly impossible to discharge with bankruptcy. Education is supposed to be the vehicle of class mobility. This student loan system has created an educated class of workers permanently indentured to the banks.

We should also be aware that our state university scholarship system discourages students from taking mathematics and science classes. Students maintain their scholarships based on their grade-point average. If I am a student on a scholarship, though I may be interested in science, it is in my interest to study an easier subject in which I can be sure I’ll maintain a high GPA.

The good news is that our nation has an abundance of liberal arts and humanities graduates, many of which have no student loan debt due to having attended public universities on scholarship. The bad news is we have to import students from overseas to meet our science and math needs.

If we want students to graduate with degrees our economy needs, we should consider the difficulty of the courses a student is taking when awarding scholarships and not use GPA alone. If we want our college graduates to be able to afford homes and spend money in the communities in which they live, we need to find a way to fund higher education without straddling them with debt.

Not doing these things will not only slow the pace of our economic growth but ignore a massive debt bubble just waiting to bust.

Brandon Givens is a Hall County educator and frequent columnist.