Giving children purchasing power could rightsize college debt

I mean, maybe it couldn't, but it's an idea I'm thinking about so I might as well think it all the way through.

The flip side to giving children purchasing power is obviously giving them the opportunity to earn money, and as soon as you say that someone's going to say THERE ARE CHILD LABOR LAWS FOR A REASON, and I don't think children should be obligated to work at a job they hate, nor do I think they should be obligated to work at a job that exhausts them or puts them in unsafe situations or etc. etc. etc.

I'm not saying that.

The next thing you're going to say is GO BACK TO WRITING ABOUT MUSICALS, and I'm going to say I am writing about musicals, because what I wanted more than anything in the world was to go to college with the musical I had drafted the previous summer and work one-on-one with faculty to improve it (before working collaboratively with other students to stage it).

This was what I wanted out of my college experience. It was also what Lin-Manuel Miranda wanted out of his college experience.

My guess is that if you substitute "musical" for, I don't know, "robot" or "space" or "great American novel" or "brilliant business idea" or "unsolved math problem" or something, there are plenty of other words we could stick in there, but my guess is that other teenagers may have wanted similar things out of college.

And college does not want those kinds of things from teenagers.

First of all, it doesn't scale.

Second of all, it gets in the way of the curriculum.

But imagine that – and look, I'm not even the first person to have imagined this – imagine that all of the money I earned and saved as a teenager could have been used to pay not for a generalized college curriculum but for private musical-writing lessons.

And say that I could have vetted potential institutions specifically by their ability to provide private musical-writing lessons.

And say that I could have chosen to go into debt to get those lessons, if I determined that they were worth the cost.

The only way I could be able to successfully assess whether the debt was worth it was by having true purchasing power throughout my childhood.