>> it was the federal government's mandate and responsibility to provide exactly this for its citizenship The federal government's attempts to do this are the

>> it was the federal government's mandate and responsibility to provide exactly this for its citizenship The federal government's attempts to do this are the primary reason college tuition price increases have drastically outstripped inflation since the modern student loan system. When a lender will provide essentially unlimited money to unqualified borrowers to spend at a third party, the third party is incentivized to raise prices. And the horrible consequence of this is that to combat this, politicians have essentially just made those federal loan terms more onerous on borrowers, under the naive belief that most of those taking out large quantities of student loans are sophisticated enough to understand the burden they put on themselves by taking out unsecured debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy (and this should have been painfully obvious, given that credit card companies have been preying on unsophisticated college students for decades). I was one of those unsophisticated young people, but I (luckily) got out before I spent a truly life-ruining amount of money on a degree I had no plans to use.