Student debt is one of the key reasons why everyone younger than the baby boomers are wage slaves having to split the rent on a $3,000 a month apartment as 30 year olds, never owning their own house or able to afford to start their own business or have a family until their late 30s/mid 40s.
Cancel all student debt. For private debts, the government buys the endowments. This will give people the ability to settle down and have kids. The younger you have kids, the better because you have more energy to do it. Will also lead to small businesses emerging, bolstering local economies.
1). Not based in reality.
Average student debt is $32K. Median student loan debt is $17K. Average and median interest rates are about 6 and 5 percent respectively.
All of this means that student loans are far easier to repay than a mortgage. Median is actually more representative at the national level - the average is skewed by people going to universities that cost $50-$60 thousand.
Repaying the average student debt would take $350 a month payments over 10 years
Repaying the median student debt would take $170 a month payments over 10 years.
Neither of these are incredible financial burdens
The reality is that there are certain general rules people should be following when going to college if they don't have parents they can afford to pay; for example, you should go to an in-state public university. Going local will make it even cheaper.
2). Quite frankly, if you're splitting the rent on a $3K a month apartment, you're a fool, and you could almost certainly instantly get an effective 20%+ pay raise by moving somewhere else. Part of the problem is that many people feel they should be
entitled to be able to live anywhere they want.
If you can't afford to live in NYC, LA, or Chicago, guess what? You should move. You should
not expect society to heavily subsidize your continuing presence there.
If poor people would start moving out of NYC, LA, Chicago, etc., what would happen is cost of living would fall (due to decrease of demand) and wages would rise (due to decreases in supply) until eventually it would be viable for lower class people to have living wages in those places.
3) Increases in wealth doesn't actually correlate with having more children.
(I mean, that's not entirely true, but that's generally true. Many people in society value having children way less than they used to; its been a big cultural shift in America. Currently due to COVID we have a baby crisis and will likely have a global population crisis over the next few decades, but it'll hit America even worse because we're likely to have a Japan or China level population pyramid.)
If you want to increase the number of babies, changing values will do more than changing paychecks.
The college and education system as a whole is pretty deeply despicable. Right now it’s preached constantly that you must go to college to have any success, said college is skyrocketing in prices, the debt system is uniquely terrible in that you can’t dismiss anything as bankruptcy, and degrees aren’t as worthwhile, further compounded by “merit” based immigration depressing wages and taking away jobs from much of the rising industries. All of this needs pretty comprehensive reform addressing all of it. Personally, I’d like something that forces the colleges to pay back student debt or generally smashes our entire higher education system with a hammer so we can rebuild it better.
I'd take a look at Coursera.
There's currently (especially in the tech industry) a rise in certifications being offered by companies like IBM, Google, etc. There's also an increase in straight-out-of-high-school internships and apprenticeships.
What I think will eventually happen is that (hopefully) certain certifications will rise to become 'gold standards' in terms of qualifications and knowledge.
Over time, having a certain certifications will (again hopefully) be eventually seen as a good substitute for having a college degree, and will be enough to get people entry level positions in IT or programming. I think its a distinct possibility over the next few decades.
Hopefully, other industries will follow.