Washington Mutual petitioned Harry Reid hard to make bankruptcy much harder to achieve. Harry Reid, (D) Nevada, acquiesced. After all, Nevada does banner credit card business. As a result, credit card debt became much harder to disburse. As a consequence, people stopped using their credit cards so much. They also discovered that foreclosure, when you have very little money down and no equity because you've refinanced three times, isn't that much more heinous than "moving away" so lots of people walked away from their mortgages. Washington Mutual, whose income stream was much more balanced towards mortgages than credit cards, went tits up one day shy of its 119th anniversary. Student loans can only be disbursed in death. They are far and away the most onerous debt anyone can take on. Not only that, they're risk-free for lenders. If you default on your student loan, the government pays the institution that lent you the money in full. They then take on your debt and pursue you to the end of your days. As a consequence, student loans were extended to anyone and everyone and the ready availability of capital led to the ready increase of prices led to the ready increase of non-educational positions to attract students with health clubs, concierge services and resort-style dormitories. I helped design a lot of these facilities in the early '00s. But it's been long enough that everyone thinking of going to college knows an older relative who has been kept out of adulthood by wage slavery to their student loans, and they know those older relatives are not working in fields that were only available to them through their education. I'm currently at war with a program that's torturing one of my employees. It's lost 80% of its administrators in the past ten years. Their applicant pool in 2012 was 150 people deep with 30 accepted; their applicant pool in 2019 was 18 people deep and half of them have dropped out already. The value is nakedly absent now. You can take something, make it look appealing, trap people with it and never let them go for only so long. Eventually they'll wise up and make rational economic choices. A friend of mine married a doctor who found an analysis in 2005 comparing "become a dermatologist" to "become a contract driver for Fedex." Even with the truck purchase the Fedex driver was economically ahead for the first 18 years. So what, exactly, is your BA in philosophy from Hiram College getting you? You were paying some percentage of 37 grand a year, and now you're paying most of 24 grand a year. They've also fired one in five of your teachers. So after four years you're something like $70k-$80k in debt and you have a nothing degree from a nothing school. Jeffrey Selingo argued in College Unbound that what you want to look at when you're looking at college is not US News and World Report but the size of their endowments. His argument was the better they are at making money from sources other than tuition, the better they can focus on teaching instead of making money. But ain't nobody got an edge anymore and if your school budget depends on six percent a year on your endowment and you're making three, your college is fucked. And everyone is making three, and nobody is making six, and who the fuck ever heard of Hiram College? It gets you the door on the left. If you're going to get the door on the left anyway, why not do it without $80k in debt?