Josh Freedman of Forbes has some advice for prospective college students. Think twice before you fund your education with student loans.

Risky Business: Why Student Loans Are The Worst Way To Fund College

As the number of students attending colleges and universities has steadily increased and the cost for most students has climbed even faster, student debt figures (both total and per person) have continued to get bigger. Arguments about the likelihood of a “higher education bubble” abound. Struggles with loan payments are so commonplace that hipsters in Brooklyn were struggling with loan payments way before you.

The student debt issue can be overstated, and often is. Yet the concern stems from the right place: the way we currently fund a big share of our higher education system, through mortgage-style loans, is one of the worst possible ways to pay for college. The major plans for higher education finance reform attempt to address the problems created by student loans – some more successfully than others.

A Very Brief History Of How We Got Here

Like an intoxicated college student after a party, college access has lurched forward in fits and starts since the first colleges were established in the United States. At the outset, most college students were wealthy, white, and wore funny hats – all of which were indicators of having enough time, money, and status to be able to take a few years off from being in the workforce. The Morrill Land-Grant Act, passed by Congress in 1862 after the South seceded, expanded the higher education landscape (no pun intended) by establishing a series of colleges to teach agriculture, engineering, and the liberal arts and leading to the American system of research universities as centers of innovation. A century later, the GI Bill opened up college to returning veterans from World War II; the GI Bill was later broadened into the Higher Education Act of 1965, signed into law by Lyndon Johnson.