I actually thought his piece was well written and I enjoyed it. I thought his description of the cultural and systemic influences were pretty good. His parents believed education was worth any cost, he was a young man who aspired to be a writer and didn't care about money, lenders were more than happy to throw money at them. I think it's clear that in retrospect, he can see the mistakes, but at the time, the choices they made seemed obvious.
I did not get the impression that he was waiting for savior at all. His family has consistently made debt payments whenever possible, except for when he deferred them by taking a community college class.
I don't know if it's fair, but I do think that we all have to pay for our mistakes. It sucks that a lender is basically allowed to add a non-bankruptible mortgage to a student's life with no consideration for ability to repay. In every other kind of lending, consumers are protected from themselves - lenders won't give you money if they don't think you'll pay it back. But for some reason, the government decided that 18 year olds going to college (and their parents) should not be afforded the same protection. But it happened, and now those students pay for it. It would be nice if the government would change the law so that it stopped happening though.
If a student can't take out $200,000 for a Masters in Fine Arts, then guess what? They probably won't get a Masters in Fine Arts. Which is a good thing. Truly talented students will continue to have access to scholarships, but otherwise demand will drop and most schools won't even have a Fine Arts program.
I have clients in this situation. A lot of them deferred their student loans for as much as a decade, causing the balance to balloon. Eventually they put themselves on income based repayment and are praying for Bernie Sanders to come take their loans away. Or at least take away the tax trap that forgiveness will cause in 25 years. Of course, if they had gone on IBR from the start, they would be halfway through their payment plan by now. The problem with these students, is they tended to put a blindfold on and try to ignore their student loan problems. They consistently make decisions to hold back their income, because they don't want to pay more to their loans, which (they reason) will eventually be forgiven anyway.
The would-be opera singer with $250,000 in student loan debt who decided to become a stay at home mom, could have instead been working for the past 10 years and gotten her debt paid off. The guy with $300,000 of medical school debt could have made the decision to use his degree instead of deciding he'd rather be a writer - by now he could have paid the debt off, quit his job, and could still be a writer... one without $300k in debt.
I have sympathy for them because of the cultural and systemic influences that led them down this road. But I lack sympathy, because by refusing to face their debt and take responsibility, they have made their problem much worse.