I see what you're saying. Reading it now, it hit me that government programs have to ask for budget increases, but colleges can just raise the price and be guaranteed the money because students can always get more loans.

So this was actually the intention behind transitioning colleges from free to paid. It created the student loan bubble because there was no check on how much college could cost. To fix it, we could just do the reverse and make state colleges free with their budgets set by the government, substantially lower than they are now.