> contributes to increasing their availability Increased availability is not always good. This is a clear case where getting the loans was a terrible financial

> contributes to increasing their availability Increased availability is not always good. This is a clear case where getting the loans was a terrible financial decision, since she's only earning enough to pay off a tiny fraction of the principal. We should be decreasing availability to people who have no realistic possibility of paying off the loans, especially when they don't even have the option of bankruptcy. The idea that making loans available to people with marginal prospects of paying them back is always helping them is bogus. It removes pressure on colleges to trim their costs to help poor students, as well as encouraging people who financially won't benefit from a degree to pursue one anyway. I'm saying this as someone who got mired in debt going through college and spent years climbing out of that hole. Things worked out for me in the end, but the loans were so easily available that I didn't consider the alternatives. Now I'm so allergic to debt I don't even want a mortgage.