According to the most recent data, nearly half of America’s college students drop out before obtaining their degree. However, they are leaving school with something else: student loan debt.

A recent report from the Education Sector, a think tank, shows that 30 percent of college students who took out loans eventually dropped out. As Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce, noted, this is a problem because of the severe drop in earning potential that occurs when a student leaves school without a degree:

“In the end, it’s about money and time,” said Anthony Carnevale, director of the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University. “There’s almost a synergy between the two that will knock you out of school.”

The cost to the economy is roughly half a trillion dollars, he said. Although college dropouts make more than those with only a high school diploma, he said they earn about a million dollars less than college graduates over their careers.

Among 18 countries tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, “the United States finished last (46 percent) for the percentage of students who completed college once they started it.”

In 2010, the total cost in lost earnings and tax revenue due to college dropouts in America was $4.5 billion. In California alone, “college dropouts are losing nearly $15 billion in earnings over their work lives, costing the federal government more than $3 billion in lost income taxes.”

2012 presumptive presidential nominee Mitt Romney released his higher education plan Wednesday, decrying the nation’s “education crisis.” During a speech before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Romney blamed President Obama for rising tuition prices and increasing student debt.

Of course, tuition increases and growing debt are a phenomenon several decades in the making. And Romney’s plan would make the problem decidedly worse in two important ways, giving federal money away to Wall Street banks and predatory for-profit colleges, two industries to which Romney has extensive ties.

First, as he’s promised before, Romney intends to divert money away from student aid — instead giving it away to banks — by repealing Obama’s student loan reforms:

Reverse President Obama’s nationalization of the student loan market and welcome private sector participation in providing information, financing, and the education itself.

President Obama did not nationalize the student loan market. (Plenty of banks still make private sector student loans.) Instead, Obama and the Democrats cut private banks out of the federal student loan program, ending billions in subsidies that were needlessly going to banks for acting as loan middlemen. The money saved went into the Pell Grant program. Romney’s plan would entail taking away Pell money in order to pay Wall Street to service federal loans.

Second, Romney would remove regulations meant to protect students from predatory for-profit colleges:

Ill-advised regulation imposed by the Obama administration, such as the so-called “Gainful Employment” rule, has made it even harder for some providers to operate, while distorting their incentives.

This rule simply states that colleges leaving too many students crippled with debt and without good jobs lose their access to federal dollars. Many for-profit schools make nearly all of their revenue from the federal government — in the form of the various streams of aid used by their students — yet have much high rates of student loan default than public schools. Only 11 percent of higher education students in the country attend for-profit schools, but they account for 26 percent of federal student loans and 44 percent of student loan defaults.

Romney is already intimately tied to the for-profit college industry. Inside Higher Ed noted that two of his advisers “have lobbied on behalf of the Apollo Group, the parent company of the University of Phoenix.” On the campaign trail, Romney has effusively praised Full Sail University, a for-profit institution. And it seems that his policy platform would be a boon to this industry which is, in many instances, extremely predatory.

Unless Congress acts, interest rates on federal student loans will double from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent in July. House Republicans have been blocking efforts to prevent the increase, saying they will only agree to do so if Democrats gut a preventive health care fund. The House Republican budget — authored by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) — called for allowing the increase to occur.

The House Republican budget also calls for cutting nearly one million students off of Pell Grants. But in an op-ed Ryan wrote over the weekend for the Wisconsin State Journal, he claimed that Republicans are just attempting to tackle “tuition inflation” with their plan for student loans:

The House-passed budget takes steps to tackle tuition inflation…Consequently, student loan debt is on pace to eclipse $1 trillion. This unprecedented level of borrowing, which has surpassed the national level of credit-card debt, is causing young people to graduate with mortgage-sized debt payments, a debilitating hurdle to clear as they seek to start a family, a career, or a business.

The House-passed budget addresses this problem by limiting the growth of open-ended financial-aid subsidies. Instead, we focus aid on low-income students who need help most. Furthermore, we propose to remove regulatory barriers that restrict competition, flexibility and innovation in higher education.

So to Ryan, the way to deal with growing student debt is to cut student aid and deregulate the industry, presumably to allow for-profit colleges to run even more wild than they already are. Ryan also claims that increasing student aid has driven tuition increases, which isn’t actually true.

Meanwhile, Ryan’s entire op-ed on student loans does not mention the fact that the interest rate on student loans will double in just over a month. Senate Republicans have been equally unconcerned with the rate increase, voting last week for several budgets that would allow it to occur. Earlier this month, Ryan said that he would not approve of closing corporate tax loopholes in order to cover the cost of preventing the rate increase.