I am always baffled at the people who talk about student loans as if they had no part in deciding to pay tuition and pursue education
That's the problem - too many people didn't.
At the risk of going off-topic... fuck it.
You know how much college costs? I mean, when you're 18, and you're applying for colleges. How much do they cost?
Zero dollars. $0. All of them. Every single one. (Almost) no 18-year-old is told: You are going to need to pay me $x to go to school. Cough up. Where's your wallet? Don't have cash, no problem, go to the ATM, I'll wait. Cashier's check is fine.
Nope. None of them are told that. Incidentally, this is why Yale and Quinnipiac, located about 10 miles apart, can charge the same price for admission: because colleges don't cost anything so whatever you charge, people will still go there. Despite the fact that one is world-renowned and one would make the world better by not existing.
So when you're a kid, you vaguely know the sticker price of this school is 60 grand a year, including tuition, room, board, and some extras. You know the sticker price doesn't apply to you. You have this grant, this scholarship, this merit thing, this need-based thing, which all come from the government, the school, the program you're in, and other sources; and eight different loans from the government, at different sums and different percentages, and every single one of those paid out to your college directly so you don't have to worry about it, you just saw that your school year has been paid for and you're eligible to register for classes.
Four years later you graduate (or five, or six) and six, nine, or twelve months after that, the letters start coming. You owe x per month. Here's a really big figure of your outstanding debt - actually, I lied, here are
twelve figures of outstanding debt all with different sums and interest rates. But all you have to do is pay x per month for ten years, that's it.
So you don't know how much it costs when you're applying, nor when you accept - or, rather, it costs $0, that is $000,000 - and then when you graduate, you pay a three-digit sum a month until eventually you're done, and you don't really know what you ended up paying anyways.
Of fucking course that's a problem, but it's very hard to blame a kid, whose parents never sat them down when they were 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18, and ten more times at 18, to explain how much money, what the expected return on investment is monetarily, what the expected return on investment is non-monetarily (job satisfaction, career opportunities, friends, acquaintances, network, possible meeting of your future wife or husband), how much money today, where the money comes from, how much money over the four/five/six years, how to reduce the sum (live off campus and cook chicken and potatoes), how to avoid inflating the sum (live on campus and order pizza and buy vodka and put it on your credit card and go to cancun and put that on a different credit card), how to balance paying off loans versus mobility versus career opportunities versus overall happiness, and how much it will cost in the end. You really think kids are gonna figure that shit out on their own?
When our grandparents may have gone to school, there was a sticker price for school, and they worked to pay that price. Now it's like navigating financial contracts between financial experts in one field, given to financial experts in another field, backed by financial experts in the government, with a good amount of legalese. Grasping the full cost and benefit of college is beyond most adults, let alone fucking teenagers.
I got lucky, very lucky, to go to a school with a coop program and to be an engineer. After two years of school, I got my first coop, and from that point - 3 years, composed of 20 months work and four semesters of school - I paid every single dime for every single expense I had, including tuition, rent, living, car and car maintenance, five cross-country drives, and bourbon besides. I get to stand with the old-timers and say: the sticker price was $x, I worked to save up $x, and that's that. (Well, and loans, but they're so low I pay more than double minimum with zero impact to my standard of living.) I got lucky not just because I could just barely save up enough to pay, I got lucky because for me it was a simple system, or at least, far simpler than it is for most people - and because my parents explained how money works to me, so I had/have a pretty good idea of where it comes from and where it goes and what the total price is over the full term. Hooray for me.
If someone took loans for a degree that makes no money, yes, they fucked up really hard. They're largely responsible for their fuckup. But so is literally everyone else who told them to go to school, follow their dreams, and everything would work out. (Well, it will work out, just ten years later than anyone expected. Hard to tell a 22-year-old that it will take another 10 years to do what their parents did at 22 and grandparents did at 17. Much harder to hear it.)
"Well, they could have x." Yes, they could have, and were they wisely counseled, they may well have. Unfortunately wise counsel was lacking, and is lacking, from the generation for whom college was
the way out and up, to those for whom it is no longer the case.