Like it or not, the way we lend money to students, and the way we portray higher education is opaque and predatory. If you were to talk to 10 randomly selected 16/17 year old high school juniors who were interested in going to college and ask them to tell you the general principles behind how student loans work and the responsibilities incurred upon graduation, how many would be able to demonstrate a concrete understanding? I'd bet less than half.
The academic system we developed in the 1900s deals well with rapid growth, but extremely poorly with declining enrollment.
I suspect a lot of where we've gone wrong is thinking that undergraduate education can and should function as something of a free market.
But as
@chemistk notes, it's a market where the buyers - 17 year old high school seniors - are legal and developmental children. There's no amount of financial education that's going to equip them to make good choices in the face of the multimillion dollar marketing blitz colleges unleash each year.
As long as there's rapid growth and seats are somewhat scarce, colleges can take the high ground somewhat and still fill their classes.
Competition makes the college market worse though, not better. Institutions make worse choices and serve their students less well when they are insecure, prioritizing lazy rivers over teaching labs or full time faculty.
Over the next ten years, the market is going to get more competitive, and academics will be replaced even further with a summer camp environment as admissions turn into the Hunger Games.
The clear solution to me is using a regulated utility model for every institution that wants federal loans. Rates have to be set and justified to a board of experts based on the costs to fulfill the institutional mission.
