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So you want to slash college debt?

Eight cutting-edge proposals for tackling America’s next great financial crisis.

Higher education is putting young Americans in a bind: As a degree becomes more crucial to their professional futures, it also becomes more daunting to their finances. The price of a college degree is rising faster than inflation, much faster than American salaries, even faster than medical expenses.

What to do? On the campaign trail, the issue has emerged as catnip for Democrats eager to nab young voters: Hillary Clinton and Martin O’Malley have proposed plans that would allow students to graduate “debt-free,” while Bernie Sanders has gone even further, proposing a sweeping overhaul that would make college completely free.

Free college is unlikely in the U.S., but within the higher-ed world, everyone from college presidents to financiers have been hatching ideas for getting costs and student debt under control. Some ideas would create new incentives for students, others would shift responsibility to colleges; some even involve new financial instruments. Below, 8 out-of-the-box ideas being floated or piloted right now.

1. Pay students to hurry up

“Four-year colleges” are something of a lie: at a majority of them, fewer than half the students graduate on time. Those extra terms add up, not only in tuition and fees but also in lost income. To keep students on a faster and financially sounder track, a growing number of schools are offering cash bonuses to students who finish in four years or less. Attend Howard University, for example, and you’ll get half-off your final semester of tuition if you graduate in four years. That saves just under $6,000 for students paying the sticker price. And students graduating from Texas state universities on time can receive $1,000 rebates on graduation.

Will it work? For colleges who think their image could get a boost from improving their graduation rates, the idea makes sense. But when it comes to bringing down student debt, on-time graduation only goes so far, and it won’t appeal to all colleges.

2. The “job or a refund" model
Student debt is a perfectly sensible investment if it leads to promising career. Without a good job, it can quickly become a crisis. Some coding bootcamps are now insuring against that risk by refunding tuition to students who don’t get jobs after graduating. These are short-term, time-intensive courses that have caught on like wildfire in Silicon Valley in recent years. Code Fellows in Seattle offers a full refund to graduates who fail to find jobs in their field, and says it only has a 3 percent refund rate.

Will it work? It’s hard to know if the model extends to degrees less narrowly focused on single job skills. And the bootcamps themselves are unaccredited schools whose growth is bringing them up against student-protection regulations; California’s Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education sent a letter last year demanding the bootcamps come into compliance with its rules.

3. Cash to schools
Every year Congress hands money to 9.4 million low-income students in the form of federal Pell grants, but the original idea was to supplement that with a second pot of money paid directly to colleges and universities to support their education. That never happened. Forty years after the law passed, Louisiana State University President F. King Alexander has argued that reviving direct school aid would give public universities a fresh incentive to serve low-income students, rather than recruiting high-paying students from out of state or even abroad.

Would it work? Federal payments might help keep tuition down and prevent low-income students from getting pushed toward expensive private or for-profit colleges. But Pell grants already cost $35 billion per year, and it’s tough to imagine lawmakers finding more money under today’s tight budget constraints.

4. A futures market in student lives

In the business world, companies raise immediate capital by promising investors a portion of their future profits. Should students be able to do the same? A crop of startups are offering a new financial product called “income share agreements,” in which investors give students money upfront for college in exchange for a percentage of student income after they graduate. Start-up lenders such as Pave and 13th Avenue have gotten this idea off the ground, and they say they’ve enjoyed good results so far. The idea isn’t new: In fact, it’s an old Milton Friedman plan. More recently it’s been adopted by Sen. Marco Rubio, who has proposed legislation clearing up a legal grey area currently surrounding these deals.

Will it work?  Right now the legal questions make it a challenge; critics also make the moral argument that garnishing future income sounds like indentured servitude. And the idea only works for students whose futures look good enough that investors want to buy in.

5. Goodbye, football

One reason college is expensive is the huge cost of running a brick-and-mortar campus, with all its amenities and employees. A few experimental colleges are trying to slash costs by radically paring these things away, teaching students largely or entirely online, without most of the things that traditionally make up a campus. With the help of outside donors, a California-based school called the University of the People has developed a nearly free degree in two majors; students pay only minor fees. Another, the $10,000-per-year Minerva Project, is testing out elite-style education offered online to students who live in Minerva-operated dorms around the world—and who don’t mind ditching the football team.

Will it work? On a small scale, it might. The University of the People expects 5,000 enrollees next year. But the idea has limited appeal; most students still prefer to learn in person, and colleges—especially those in the top tier—have deep ties to the campus-based model.

6. Let bankrupt borrowers discharge their loans
What makes student loans especially onerous is that they’re one of the only forms of debt that can almost never be discharged: They follow borrowers even through bankruptcy, and the federal government can even garnish wages or tax returns from graduates who default. As President Barack Obama works to cement his higher education legacy, the White House has floated making it easier to discharge some loans, those taken out from private lenders that aren’t federally guaranteed, in an effort to help ease student debt.

Will it work? For the private loans, it might actually make borrowing more difficult. Without that extra ability to collect, private lenders would have higher risk, and loans would likely get smaller or more expensive. And even Obama has shied away from proposing that borrowers could walk away from their federal loans; that would leave taxpayers on the hook.

7. Skin in the game
One idea that sounds far-fetched is actually catching on in discussions this fall about rewriting the country’s main higher education law: that colleges should have a financial stake in whether their students succeed. As it stands, federal grants and loan guarantees make it easier for colleges to jack up tuition with little incentive to produce results for borrowers. That might change if they had a minor equity stake in student loans, or had to pay a fee when students default— also known as “skin in the game.”

Will it work? Not if colleges have anything to say about it. “The higher education lobby—specifically the private higher education lobby—is extremely effective at lobbying” to keep the current deal in place, said Alexander Holt, policy analyst at New America. But as the public grows more and more restless about mounting higher education costs, political pressure could force them to make a deal.

8. Go to Europe!

College is far cheaper in Europe, where most students attend public universities and countries devote more government resources to higher education. Germany went completely tuition-free in 2014. The deal applies to foreigners, too, and many college and graduate programs are taught in English. Norway, too, charges no tuition or fees to international students. Amazingly, this means it can be far cheaper for an American student to fly overseas, rent an apartment and attend a top German university than it is to go to their local state school.

Will it work? For some students, it already does—in 2011, the last year for which data is available, more than 4,000 Americans sought degrees in Germany. But Europe is still out of reach for less well-off Americans, and there will surely be limits: it’s unlikely European countries would keep their doors open if that 4,000 students became 400,000.

Maggie Severns