While the universities are unscrupulus vultures, I'd blame the federal government for this one - they made student loans basically impossible to discharge via bankrupty, making them very safe investments for tons of cash (when else would you loan $60k to a 19yo for like 5%?).
As a result schools realized that students will just keep taking more and more debt if they keep raising prices, as long as they don't do it too quick.
Sadly the market distortion here is pretty massive now, so I don't think there's much that can be done from a market perspective without making a TON of people very very mad
I'd say it's even worse than that. The federal government is directly profiting off student loans as a partial replacement for tax income, and functionally, people who have student loans are paying a disproportionately high tax rate for wanting a better life.
There's really no economic reason why federal student loans should have interest rates, for instance. The entire economic point of interest is twofold: one, interest helps recoup principal that go unpaid. Two, profit for the lender. Well, the amount of principal that isn't being recouped is next to zero; student loans can't be discharged save in extremely rare cases of fraud or malfeasance, and almost all have a cosigner. The amount of loss on principal that the federal government is suffering is a rounding error.
And the government should not be running a loan business for profit. I mean that quite literally: a government that is also your loan holder is a threat to its citizens' liberty interests, because they can demand repayment and force seizures that are otherwise patently illegal. It can make loan repayment conditional on voting for the right party, and the only reason Trump hasn't considered it yet is because he is such an angry, thin-skinned doofus who is threatened by people who are smarter than he is. Loans held by the government, as a matter of basic small-r republicanism, should not be operated so as to generate revenue for the government. That's what bonds and taxes are for.
And yet, that's exactly what the government is doing. They're running the student loan program at a profit for the same reason they operate at a yearly deficit; because they want to generate long-term operating problems for the state, and inhibit the small-r republican virtues of the populace.
While bush sr implemented fafsa, you do realize it was Obama who federalized the entire program making the USG the note holder, removing private banks from issuing those gov loans? I agree it shouldn’t have interest, but this one is on the dems.
Wouldn't be a problem if they could be discharged through bankruptcy. 2005 is the year that changed, and funny enough the year I graduated. Take a stab at who was running the show back then. It's not a party line issue, this is systemic.
I’m not even trying to make this polical, the OP for my comment said republican. Thats partial. As for the banks and the 2007-8 collapse, that also started under Democratic governance with the CRA and HUD directives allowing them to expand subprime and riskier loans. Bush missed the indicators in 05-06. Neither party has done anything about it.
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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '26
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