Student Loans were once a touchy subject for me, because I was one of the people who got suckered on the whole promise of a college education. I, along with just about every other high school student graduating in the early and mid-2000s, was told "get a degree - ANY degree - and you'll make $1,000,000 more in your life time." We had people come and talk to us who went to school and majored in early Renaissance trombone and graduated to get 6 figure office jobs with full benefits. We were further told that going to a private school instead of a public one would boost our earnings even further. So a bunch of us ran off and applied to expensive schools, "knowing" we would graduate and pay off our loans years ahead of schedule.
Then we graduated either just before or during the financial collapse, and that pool of six figure jobs we were all set to dive into turned out to be empty. The dominant cultural narrative could not have changed any faster. The very same people who insisted that student loans were "good debt," right up there with mortgages, were suddenly asking why we all went and got student loans and acting as though that wasn't something absolutely everybody told us we MUST do. It was, and is, a very frustrating time to be a recent college graduate. And as I see other people being put through the same bait and switch, I still get angry, because these are teenage children who not only have not been taught any better, but who have been actively indoctrinated into believing a false narrative. The "personal accountability" argument has some bearing, but in this case, I would contend ignorance absolutely is an excuse - not an excuse not to pay, but certainly a valid basis for anger and frustration.
That said, my outlook on this system is twofold.
First, I think the entire college industrial complex needs to be dismantled. College costs are a bubble that needs to burst. We need to stop handing out these ridiculous student loans which go to fund administrative salaries, extracurricular activities, and a bunch of other things which are in no way related to improved education. If schools cannot remain solvent without regular cash infusions from the government via new crops of fiscally naive freshpersons, they should restructure, be allowed to go under, or surrender themselves to be run entirely by the government. Plenty of other countries have no difficulty providing a free public university education to their populations at a lower cost than student loans are running these days. Take a lesson from them and stop subsidizing useless frills with risky loans. Further, private education loans simply shouldn't be allowed. If the gov't wants students to have subsidized education, they should do it themselves, not push banks to do it by proxy.
Second, and perhaps more importantly for this particular article, people need to be aware of the relief programs in place for folks who can't pay their loans. They did indeed agree to the terms, as did the lender, and those terms allow for a whole host of alternative payment structures, including income based repayment for federal loans. Depending on income and family size, your SL payment can be as low as $0/month (mine would be $55 if I went that route), and any remaining balance after 25 years of repayment is forgiven. The terms of IBR are incredibly generous - most folks here would have no difficulty coming up with the room in their budgets to make the corresponding payment. If you could find a job at a qualifying nonprofit or gov't agency, you could even combine it with the Public Service forgiveness program and have your full balance discharged after just 10 years. Only drawback here is that it doesn't apply to private loans, which... see above.