My children are now in their fiftys and sixties but when they were college age college loans were already starting to be offered and a few parents put the burden on their kids. My husband and I did not have a lot of money but we paid. Parents should have seen that sliding out from under their responsibility and saddling young people with no job experience or ability to earn very much was a bad idea. They were behind before they even started.

Good goal, Gov. Perry.

The more govt gets involved, the higher costs will go. Dry up the govt backed loans and tuition will shrivel. This is to say nothing about how the last we need are MORE college grads. The more you have of anything, the less value it has.

You can start by getting rid of those $250 textbooks. Used ones for $199. Now there´s a deal.

Textbooks? Why do you need a textbook? You can buy a Kindle Reader for less than most textbooks.
We aleady have a program that has been around for decades and costs nothing. It´s called Junior Achievement. But , then again, I guess I´m kinda old fashioned.

Most lecture style courses like English Literature, History, Government, Economics, etc. could be taught in an on-line course, with a video, especially if one could pause, back-up, listen to a portion again (and again) or watch a graphic presentation several times to absorb it.

But the purpose of college is support indoctrination by liberal professors, not to teach students, right? Why else would our communist-mentored president want to make sure that every person goes to college?

Of course, parents would have money to pay for college if they were not being forced to pay for a lot of things like super-insurance plans that cover abortion, contraception, drug rehab, chemical dependency, Viagra, sex-change operations, AIDs care for irresponsible gays, psychological counseling, IRS penalties, etc.

The purpose of college, #7, is to support liberal professors with lifetime employment to engage in indoctrination.

Perry may have several things wrong in his plan, but its certainly a step in the right direction.

College is about indoctrination, not education. We need to revolutionize the higher-education system. Personally, I think high school should end with 10 grades. Then, those who are capable and inclined could go on to trade schools and 2 to 4 year colleges to get practical knowledge, at no further cost - simply a continuation of public education. Some could continue on to specialty schools for medicine, law, business, etc. at low cost. How about bringing down the cost of health care by having doctors compete for business?

This should be for real degrees. The luxury degrees should be expensive enough to pay for the real degrees.

How about NO textbooks? If a university professor can´t come up with his own teaching materials he should be fired. I had a course in Quantum Mechanics where the Physics Prof was writing his own book. We students were his guinea pigs and got a free book to "proof" for him. Marvelous class.

Textbooks are out of date the moment they´re published. It´s a digital world, and it´s high time colleges bring their tuition in line with their costs. Too many tenured do-nothing professors and endless required courses that have nothing to do with the pursued degree, in order to drive up the cost of the degree.

At the end of four years in an indoctrination and desensitizing camp, a kid comes out more in debt than if he´d bought a house, skilled to maybe retail cashier level, and having an entitlement attitude that he should start out in corporate America with a corner office, a six figure salary and a staff to do the work.

Who do they think they are, Michelle and Barack?

The class size that critics say are too large at 30 kids in high school are no problem for them in college when it is literally 300 in a class and being taught by another student because the professor is on sabbatical. They get huge amounts of taxpayer money and the kids get a poor education. Some never learn and keep voting democrat.

I believe we should have degrees only for the five standard professions: medicine, law, finance, education and engineering. Everything else should be a trades program. I agree with the poster above that says we should have HS only to the 10th grade, then have 2 year trade school or the first two years of college after that. Have the SAT´s and placements earlier. Same with electronic books vs. hard covers. Have every text on a college server in hypertext, and everyone has a tablet issued for reading them. Wifi takes care of the connections. An annual fee of less than $100 would cover costs.

It should be ILLEGAL to have college loans for more debt than the degree in question can possibly service. I´ve known nurses that graduated Duke U. who owed as much as doctors, and had no hope of paying off the loans. One was a PhD in nursing! Dr. Nurse, of all things! Fancy title, but a crushing debt burden.

Things have gotten just plain crazy, all as a payoff to the education unions.

Note that some of these Professors are writing books that they then make mandatory for their classes. Quality can be iffy but they are raking it in on those texts.