And give greedy colleges and universities a direct pipeline to the US treasury. 

No thanks.

As it is, a person can choose not to go to college and avoid the student loan harpies altogether.  Make colleges and universities "free" and no one will escape the avarice of the scam.

"All told, including the contributions of individual families and the government (in the form of student loans, grants, and other assistance), Americans spend about $30,000 per student a year—nearly twice as much as the average developed country.

...

One reason for this difference is that American college students are far more likely to live away from home. And living away from home is expensive, with or without a lazy river. Experts say that campuses in Canada and Europe tend to have fewer dormitories and dining halls than campuses in the U.S. “The bundle of services that an American university provides and what a French university provides are very different,” says David Feldman, an economist focused on education at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. “Reasonable people can argue about whether American universities should have these kind of services, but the fact that we do does not mark American universities as inherently inefficient. It marks them as different.”

But on closer inspection, the data suggest a bigger problem than fancy room and board. Even if we were to zero out all these ancillary services tomorrow, the U.S. would still spend more per college student than any other country (except, again, Luxembourg). It turns out that the vast majority of American college spending goes to routine educational operations—like paying staff and faculty—not to dining halls. These costs add up to about $23,000 per student a year—more than twice what Finland, Sweden, or Germany spends on core services. “Lazy rivers are decadent and unnecessary, but they are not in and of themselves the main culprit,” says Kevin Carey, the author of The End of College and the director of the education-policy program at New America, a nonpartisan think tank."

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/09/why-is-college-so-expensive-in-america/569884/

As predicted.

     I would like to see free tuition at public universities just like K-12.  It is an investment in our human infrastructure.  That would seriously reduce the costs of attending college. 

I agree.  The more shut out the government, the more expensive college will be.  As it is banking eliminated interest free student loans during the Clinton administration, saddling graduates with even more debt to put more profit in the pockets of bankers.  The repayment of student loans helped fund more students, but that’s no longer the way it works.

You want informed decisions at the ballot box?  High school no longer provides it.  The first two years of college are remedial in too many cases and it takes longer to get out of college.  Everybody can get in a college, somewhere, but not everyone can get out with a degree.

Why don’t our graduates have the skills needed by industry to the extent that our immigration laws interfere with hiring the skills from outside our country?

Of course, we can continue to deprive youths of an education.  We probably won’t like the results.

How will you reverse the problem, then?  If you open a pipeline from the treasury to the univesities bank accounts, how are you going to keep them from draining it dry?

I'm going to leap squarely into steaming pile of shit for this one. Among our various human sub-groups, our IQ bell curves are dissimilar. I don't know all of the details, but if you divide us into various classifications the width and height of the curves differ, but overlap somewhere around the 85 to 115 area. Below around 85 I'm not sure college is a terribly useful pursuit. Some people simply aren't smart enough to master beyond a certain level of skill sets. Our schools are fairly integrated. That's not necessarily bad but it DOES present a challenge. It's harder to teach students the same material in the same classroom if the students vary in IQ by more than one or two standard deviations. Our efforts toward equality are not very enlightened. We want each kid to have the opportunity to go to college, degree in their choice of programs, share the same learning experience. Well, no. That stifles the ones on the right side of the curve and is often quite ruinous for some on the left side. Our desire for every child to achieve a well educated condition is not realistic and might actually subject kids who would be perfectly good parents and factory workers to so much failure during their formative years that they wind up broken shadows of the successful adults they might have been had the expectations been realistic. 

Not every kid is capable of learning beyond their intelligence. We could improve that by teaching organizational skills, study skills, whatever tools are available to help people incorporate new ideas into existing frameworks, etc. into K-12, but it'll only work to some degree. We also have to maintain/rebuild construction, maintenance, and manufacturing sectors. Low skill service jobs don't earn enough to build a decent life and our economy is no longer capable of providing low to medium skill jobs that do. We need to get on a Mike Rowe program that focuses average and below average kids toward trade schools where individuals can earn outstanding employment without having to be all that bright. We need those sorts of jobs, and those sorts of citizens, far more than we need more debt-ridden college dropouts and degreed children incapable of functioning in a world without safe spaces. 

Well, you don’t open a pipeline. The way it was done, universities competed.  Students paid what was borrowed and the fund perpetually helped others with less than the initial cost of setting up the program.  Students chose from the colleges that accepted them. The GI Bill was similar.  Both were beneficial, but created too many knowledgeable citizens and a middle class.  That class disappears as education declines.  Too bad since small businesses are so much better for communities.  When the big guys leave, and they do incite cities to compete for them, they often gut a community:  Pocatello was the largest city in Idaho, until they held the line with the railroad.

Nationalizing the student loans resulted in colleges and universities becoming student loan farms.  "Academic advisers" became sales people.  Students became cattle endentured for life by debts they cannot escape and degrees that really offered them no advantage in life.

I'm not sure how mixing the government even more with post secondary education will have anything other than more bad.

I'm going to leap squarely into steaming pile of shit for this one. Among our various human sub-groups, our IQ bell curves are dissimilar. I don't know all of the details, but if you divide us into various classifications the width and height of the curves differ, but overlap somewhere around the 85 to 115 area. Below around 85 I'm not sure college is a terribly useful pursuit. Some people simply aren't smart enough to master beyond a certain level of skill sets. Our schools are fairly integrated. That's not necessarily bad but it DOES present a challenge. It's harder to teach students the same material in the same classroom if the students vary in IQ by more than one or two standard deviations. Our efforts toward equality are not very enlightened. We want each kid to have the opportunity to go to college, degree in their choice of programs, share the same learning experience. Well, no. That stifles the ones on the right side of the curve and is often quite ruinous for some on the left side. Our desire for every child to achieve a well educated condition is not realistic and might actually subject kids who would be perfectly good parents and factory workers to so much failure during their formative years that they wind up broken shadows of the successful adults they might have been had the expectations been realistic. 

Not every kid is capable of learning beyond their intelligence. We could improve that by teaching organizational skills, study skills, whatever tools are available to help people incorporate new ideas into existing frameworks, etc. into K-12, but it'll only work to some degree. We also have to maintain/rebuild construction, maintenance, and manufacturing sectors. Low skill service jobs don't earn enough to build a decent life and our economy is no longer capable of providing low to medium skill jobs that do. We need to get on a Mike Rowe program that focuses average and below average kids toward trade schools where individuals can earn outstanding employment without having to be all that bright. We need those sorts of jobs, and those sorts of citizens, far more than we need more debt-ridden college dropouts and degreed children incapable of functioning in a world without safe spaces. 

I agree.  Higher education is not for everyone.  Worthless degrees costing tens of thousands of dollars are not for everyone.

And the condescention of the elites toward blue collar work is reprehensible.