When suggesting trying to solve the problem, I'd first consider what caused the problem. It obviously was not always this way. The stories of people in the 50s

When suggesting trying to solve the problem, I'd first consider what caused the problem. It obviously was not always this way. The stories of people in the 50s and 60s working their way through college with a part time job and then graduating not only not in debt but even with a little bit set aside for a down payment on their first home are not just stories. That was a real thing. So what happened? We decided that it would be a good thing if anybody could go to school without having to pay for it immediately. It's a pretty well intended motivation. And so how did we do this? We tried to solve it through regulations. The idea was pretty straight forward. To help ensure anybody could afford to go to college the government would give loans unconditionally, aside from financial need. To try to ensure people wouldn't just take the money and squander it, the law was adjusted to prevent these loans from being able to be dismissed in bankruptcy. And indeed college attendance shot up after these laws were passed. But this did two things. It sharply increased the demand for post-secondary education, and it also increased the supply of money available to pay for it. Predictably costs started to gradually rise. And so as this happened, it began to be that government loans alone were no longer sufficient to ensure everybody could go to college without having to immediately pay for it. And so we now did the exact same thing with private loans - they could no longer be dismissed, which meant that from a lender's perspective, giving a loan was practically free money. And we've seen what happened here already. Costs skyrocketed since there was now an effectively unlimited amount of money that students could borrow. The only reason costs stopped accelerating as fast is because we reached 'peak college' in 2010-2011 with enrollment figures with enrollment continuing to decline since then in spite of an increasing population. ---- The point I'm making with this is that the one and only reason we're in this situation is because of well intended regulations. It's easy to say just "regulate out of existence exploitative student loan conditions" but things like this are far easier to say than do. For instance, as you make loans less profitable for lenders, they end up becoming more selective on who they lend to. In turn we end up going back to where we started where college is no longer something for everybody. And in my opinion this is probably the right direction, but at the same time I think many people would disagree with this. If you happen to be one of these people then you end up in this tough situation of trying to create a system where lenders can/will lend to people who they probably should not be lending to. Getting a degree in underwater basket weaving isn't going to likely lead to a life such that one could repay years of debts taken on to obtain such a degree, even if the cost of education was relatively "affordable."