Education loans, especially the highly-regulated and specific form currently practiced[0], do not have collateral. If you fail to restructure your other debts,

Education loans, especially the highly-regulated and specific form currently practiced[0], do not have collateral. If you fail to restructure your other debts, there is property to control; if you fail to restructure your student debts, the lender is out on their ass. Student loans are pretty soft on borrowers, the way I look at it. What perhaps should be done is to make the liability conditional on income: loans for nonsense degree mill "educations" would become dramatically more expensive, which I think would be a good thing; but so would loans for anything lenders didn't find promising. Of course, in the U.S, the government is involved in a lot of the lending, which means that they'll probably do whatever irrational thing pleases whoever they're trying to please; except this time around when they're doing the thing they are responsible for doing (actually enforcing the terms of the loan agreements) rather than the popular thing. Here in Canada, I feel the system is pretty unfair to people who did not require higher education; I'm stuck paying for the useless, pompous ignorami who make private life harder and more boring for me with their prefab ideas and vague bloviation, and I've been paying net taxes into it since I was 17. When I move to the U.S, I hope I'm not paying even more for the same garbage that convinces smart people that they are useless without college, and convinces dumb people that college has automatically made them useful. [0] As long as the conversation about the tremendous amount of student debt held in the U.S. is centered around loan forgiveness, lenders have no incentive to improve their practices. The federal government can't just steal their property, so they figure they'll get a sweet settlement and a smooth exit, just like the lenders who were publicly scapegoated, and privately rewarded, a decade ago.