the bottom line is government and schools and working together and the students have no recourse.
Yes they do. They can go to a school they can afford. No one is forcing them to take out these loans with these terms. Stupidity is not an excuse.
So your suggestion is to cash flow college?
At my state's minimum wage of $8.70/hr, working 40 hours a week 52 weeks a year gets you a gross income of $18,096. Our flagship university's estimated cost of attendance (tuition, fees, residence hall, meal plan) for in state students is $24,834. So right off the bat, that's not happening.
When you add in transportation costs, books, living costs for school breaks, etc, that $18k (minus taxes & insurance--if it's even offered--) isn't going to get you very far. Plus, you'd be working full time and trying to attend school full time; the vast majority of minimum wage jobs expect complete schedule flexibility, so your attendance and therefore grades would be abysmal (actually this is a reason a lot of people get sucked into the for-profit online college thing).
Upthread I was talking about the virtues of community college, and how they're pretty much free. So, maybe that's a better option for someone who's working minimum wage, right? Full-time at the local CC is $3866 per year, including only tuition and fees. Well, you still have to pay for a place to live, and probably a car since you're going to be rushing back and forth between full time work and full time classes, and food, and books/school supplies, and utilities, and a computer (sorry, not an optional thing anymore for a college education), and medical care, and clothing, and whatever else.
Community college might be doable, but again, you'd be looking at working full time and attending school full time. Maybe it's because I'm in a fairly rigorous program at a pretty good research university, but I couldn't handle that. I've worked throughout my education, pretty much since I was 14 (yay farm labor). I'm currently working around 12 hours a week in between classes, and taking 14 credits. I have at least 20 hours a week of schoolwork on top of actually attending class and labs, plus things like searching for research opportunities and applying to internships. I definitely wouldn't be able to maintain my GPA if I was working full time, or probably even >20 hours a week. And I'm not in an engineering program, or what I consider to be a more intense science program (aka I'm in bio, not physics or chem).
Plus, there's the whole issue that starting out at community college, while very advantageous financially, can really screw you over if you're in an internship/lab-experience-required type field.
It's not as simple as 'go to a school you can afford.'