The backing ethical stance is that EVERYONE should be protected, from everything. But there's a practical problem applying this to student loans -- nobody who

The backing ethical stance is that EVERYONE should be protected, from everything. But there's a practical problem applying this to student loans -- nobody who needs student loans will come out of college with meaningful assets. No house, maybe no car, no income. If you could discharge student loans in bankruptcy... there's absolutely no reason to not do it immediately upon graduation. Everyone would do declare BK and clear their debts, for good reason. So nobody would ever give a student loan. Also for good reason. So BK doesn't apply to student loans. Obviously there are other fixes here (government paid tuition, income based repayment, online classes, whatever), but the naive fix ("allow students to discharge loans") would not get us to a better-functioning outcome. (unless your position is that burning the system down is a better outcome than status quo, which is a position, but it's then dishonest to argue that discharging loans is a "quick fix")