College Financial Aid Is Killing Us -- Today's Outrage

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- I've often found counterintuitive notions offer solutions. One of the first, and important of these notions was made by Christopher Columbus. Because he knew the earth was round, he came up with the radical notion of sailing east to reach the west. Then there's the thinking behind vaccinations -- a little disease can fuel the body's own defenses. And of course the good old Laffer Curve, which says as tax rates rise beyond a certain point, tax receipts will fall.

I'd like to throw another into the mix: Student loans are making college prohibitively expensive. ( Student loans are like an albatross around the neck of our economy.)

What's brought this on, at least for me, was the revelation last year that student loans totaled some $1 trillion. That's a thousand billions, and a staggering amount of money.

My contention is it's the existence of student loans that is driving the cost of college through the roof. For evidence, look no further than venerable Harvard University, with an endowment estimated to be $32 billion. Let's do the numbers, back of the envelope style: