s. For example, I think everyone here would accept history and archaeology as having significant academic, social, and intellectual value; the fact is it has limited market value. In these cases, such a degree should not be funded by large amounts of debt. Again, in the current situation, the college is incentivized to sell as many History degrees to as many as they can possibly pack into the stadium lecture hall, regardless of the students ability to repay, and regardless of the job prospects in the discipline of history.
What I'm trying to tell you is that while there's precious few jobs actually marked
HISTORIAN JOB, there's tons of jobs where a genuinely-educated individual in any liberal arts discipline may apply themselves. The whole 'genuinely educated' part is key here.
Now I have so far not needed student loans, and my entire debt is standing at $600 (which is an ordinary loan), but this is due to me not living in America.
If I understand correctly, the United States Constitution does not provide the government any authority to fund colleges, except perhaps military research, academies, and perhaps colleges located in Federal territories such as Washington, D.C. However, Abraham Lincoln built a pile of colleges, so I might be wrong.
Therefore, it seems to me that the Constitutionally-appropriate path would be to end college grants and loan guarantees (excepting, again, those made for the purpose of constitutionally-appropriate research and training potential Federal employees, but these would be vanishingly-small percentage of the stuff that exists today). States could still fund state colleges if they felt it would further their purposes (some state constitutions protect a 'right' to education, for instance).
A college could, in this circumstance, either be a for-profit college and pump out law degrees and MBAs, or a 'respectable' non-profit corporation and turn out history degrees, or any combination thereof. Many colleges have their own endowments that allow them to do things that are not necessarily profitable.
However what we must divest ourselves of is the idea that everybody must attend college, and that college is a magic prosperity-stick. It is not.