Who should be on the hook for student loans?

Alex is off and higher ed reporter Tim Post is home with a sick kid, so posting will be light today. To give you something higher ed-related to chew on, I offer up this intriguing suggestion from Glenn Harlan Reynolds at The Washington Examiner (via Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Beast.) Reynolds proposes making schools responsible for discharged loans to provide incentive to infuse their product - education - with value:

Up until now, the loan guarantees have meant that colleges, like the writers of subprime mortgages a few years ago, got their money up front, with any problems in payment falling on someone else.

Make defaults expensive to colleges, and they'll become much more careful about how much they lend and what kinds of programs they offer. China, which has already faced its own higher education bubble, is simply shutting down programs that produce too many unemployable graduates.

What do you think?

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