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Somebody falling for a scam does not make that scam morally acceptable. If I make all sorts of medical claims about my special proprietary snake oil, and some people actually experience placebo benefits from it, that doesn't prevent me from being a scam artist. The behaviour that these universities/colleges engaged in is absolutely deserving of censure - and at the very least they shouldn't receive extra financial privileges like they do currently. If you want to talk about treating 18 year olds like adults, we should also treat the people who made the terrible decision to loan them money like adults and retroactively remove the inability to discharge those debts through bankruptcy.
And yes I understand that all of these ideas are bad for academia - but that's what happens when you stop being academia and start fighting in the culture war.
I would like to burn the academy to the ground so I'm not offended by things being bad for them. But the rot here starts at guaranteeing the loans in the first place. The schools didn't lie about the degrees, they were real degrees, if they promised job opportunities then they should be punished for that, but I don't really think that's the case.
We interfered with the free market and once again it backfired spectacularly, if this hurts scumbag academia as well then good, but my focus is on the habit we have of trying to subvert the market and being shocked(shocked!) when our meddling burns us. It's very important we stop doing this.
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