If college were a free learning experience, college for all might be a great plan. Students could learn what they missed in middle school and high school, filling in gaps from earlier years if they were sufficiently motivated.  Students could find two-year programs that prepared them for the trades after they decided standard college coursework was not for them.

But the tab for tuition at many private four-year colleges now runs around $200,000 or more – a heap of debt for almost anyone. Tuition alone at a for-profit school costs about $15,000 for a year on average, and much more at some schools. Public schools are better, varying from state to state. Tuition and fees at a state community college can be brought in for under $5,000 in many states with the average running around $3,000.

The following chart is from http://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tables/average-published-undergraduate-charges-sector-2014-15. The first chart is for tuition and fees, the second for room and board, something that community college students and others may be able to avoid.

When I think about the current student debt crisis, I flash to animal rights activist and scientist Temple Grandin, who created the serpentine ramp to ensure the humane treatment of cattle going off to be slaughtered.  Grandin designed the ramp with curves so cattle cannot see the abattoir or slaughterhouse workers.  Semicircular turns take advantage of natural cattle movements, and walking nose to tail, cows march their way to the kill floor without panicking, just as groups of our high school population march off into their $349 per hour college classes, including groups such as functionally illiterate, bilingual students, students with ACT test scores in the teens (ACT itself estimates the low twenties to represent college readiness.), and students with histories of academic failures, sometimes punctuated by repeated disciplinary actions related to behavioral challenges.

We push college at students relentlessly, class by class, grade by grade, until they graduate. For many students, college is absolutely the right move, especially when family financial help is available. An enormous group of students graduates from college each year, gaining substantial earning power. For almost any student able to make the grade, going to college proves the best choice.

But we need to recognize that, for other students, college can be a slow, circuitous trip into crippling monthly debt, carrying little chance of a happy ending with a certificate or degree. Too few people charged with creating current educational policy appear to be thinking about the debt at the end of the chute. In the meantime, I guarantee that guy mopping floors for $9 an hour while carrying $26,000 of debt for the criminology program he failed to complete thinks about his monthly loan payment all the time. Quarter by quarter, semester by semester, some students dig themselves into deeper holes until they drop out or fail out because they have been sent to a place where they never belonged in the first place.

Idealism must be tempered with realism. Exceptional students sometimes succeed despite abysmal high school records, but we should not be basing our recommendations on exceptional students. That counselor who put Rip into my Spanish class a few years ago because he needed a foreign language for college? He did Rip no favor. Rip failed out midyear, but not before disrupting class, week after week. His overall high school average was hovering between an “F” and a “D,” with frequent trips throughout the day to the Dean’s office for disciplinary infractions. (He’s the only student I ever had who pulled his pants down in class. Thank goodness for the plaid boxers that covered the ass he decided to wiggle at the class.)

Too many educational administrators tell students they must go on to college. That’s what the counselor told Rip, who then told me he planned to go to a prominent Illinois university. He intended to major in business, and then enter the NFL.

Eduhonesty: I was sitting on a hallway floor talking to this student as he refused to do a classroom art project. The art teacher had the rest of my students. I looked at this short, bearded boy and I ducked the controversy, I’ll admit. I had no idea what to say. A kid who is failing more than half his classes should never be told to go to college.

Certain counselors need to stop drinking the Kool-Aid and come down to Earth.

I sat in that hallway looking at a young man who was living a lie. He had no idea what the world expected or demanded. And the last thing on Earth he needed was to begin taking out student loans.