"If you don't currently have a cash flow that would allow you to make a $2000/month mortgage payment, don't take out that mortgage. If you don't currently have

"If you don't currently have a cash flow that would allow you to make a $2000/month mortgage payment, don't take out that mortgage. If you don't currently have a cash flow that would allow you to make a $500/month student loan payment, don't take out that loan." I used to feel the same way, and it's easy to vilify students who get to experience a more expensive education and place the onus on these students to pay back the debts. However, I realized that there's much more to this. Students typically apply for such loans while they are still in high school, in October of the year prior to starting college. It's uncommon for students to have the financial foundation needed to understand the significance of taking out such huge loans. I mean how could they possibly know what they'll "cash flow" four years when they graduate (or if they even do graduate)? In contrast, an adult who takes out a mortgage for a home after earning steady income has his/her assets, liabilities, and income meticulously scrutinized by the loan officer of some major bank. The adult is much more equipped with the information and experience to understand the commitment of this debt, and it's reasonable to place blame the adult if he is unable to make his mortgage payments. Things get tricky when determining if a teenager is qualified to make a decision about taking out a student loan. We have regulation in place to disallow teenagers from smoking, gambling, and drinking, and yet a teenager can sign off on decades of indebtedness and financial insecurity without the proper regulation or warning labels. The phenomenon of teenage students misinformed-ly taking out loans is almost identical to how banks had issued subprime mortgage debt to debtors during the 2008 financial crisis by speculating and overestimating to these debtors their ability to pay back these loans. So under the premise that students are not fully qualified to make such financial decisions and entitlement aside, solving this problem of insurmountable student debt across the country starts with better financial education for young kids and stricter regulation on banks for issuing unreasonable student loan debt. This is necessary because a bank cannot "repossess" an education, yet there is no recourse for students who are faced with snowballing debt.