If you want to understand the student debt bubble, you need to understand financial bubbles. Take any commodity that "everyone knows is valuable", figure out ho

If you want to understand the student debt bubble, you need to understand financial bubbles. Take any commodity that "everyone knows is valuable", figure out how to turn it into a financial instrument and re-sell it to a third party investor who has no relationship with either consumer or lender and knows nothing about the product, and then you can create a speculative bubble because everyone starts trading in derivatives of the commodity without knowing anything about it, the level of risk involved, or even who ows them money. This happened with Tulips, it happened with Mortgages, and now its happening with Education. There are a lot of good books on bubbles if you dig for them. All the Devils are Here is a good one. The Big Short is good too - once you realize some of those people who got rich betting against housing bubble, are now betting against the education bubble, and have been for 8 years but nobody listened to them (again).