The Student-Loan Mess: Good Intentions and Wasted Brainpower

By Eric Best. Joel started thinking about writing about student loans more than 30 years ago, when he noticed that the national conversation about student loans had somehow shifted from depicting students as young people who deserved help to characterizing student borrowers as “deadbeats.”
Eric, who had taken a job dealing with corporate loans during the run-up to the Great Recession, noticed that student-loan policy started to mimic mortgage deregulation that had led to the housing bubble, in that Democrats wanted to give more people access to the American Dream via increased credit, while Republicans favored minimal government regulation. That combination resulted in vast debt growth with reduced individual-level oversight. More...