The major part of the reason for that is the requirement for actually preventing it: Congress needs to act. Congress is divided[0], and only one party is likely

The major part of the reason for that is the requirement for actually preventing it: Congress needs to act. Congress is divided[0], and only one party is likely to favor reducing the number of unsustainable student loans given out. (Or, to the extent that the other party might favor measures that would have that result, it would be secondary to other goals that would be antithetical to their opponents'—so either way, nothing is going to get passed.) Fundamentally, there are really only two ways forward that reduce the number and magnitude of student loans: Either make higher education[1] dramatically more affordable, by restoring a lot of the federal support from it that's been removed over the past several decades, or make it dramatically less accessible, by various kinds of measures that either outright restrict who can go to college, or condition federal funds on other less-straightforward limitations. Unfortunately, in addition to reducing the overall education level of our populace, the latter category would do little to reduce the burden on those who still want to go to college—indeed, there's reason to think it might make things worse, as the same facilities get fewer students and thus less tuition. [0] Noting that I am phrasing this extremely obliquely to try to define the problem as clearly as I can without running afoul of site guidelines on political partisanship. [1] This would, IMO, include most kinds of trade schools; I do think that providing incentives for many people to go into trades rather than colleges and universities is a sort of middle ground here, but it's far from a solution to the identified problem.