This problem is easily resolved: make student loan debt like any other form of debt, dischargable in Chapter 7, and reorganizable in Chapter 13. This would force banks to make intelligent loans, and force universities to stop their fucking feeding frenzy and rationalize tuition costs within the constraints of the actual value of their product. As things stand, market forces have been eliminated entirely. There is nothing to hold any of these bastards accountable, on the university side or the banking side. This applies even if it is “the government”–which is to say that monstrosity that takes taxes in from one group, and feeds them out to another, often borrowing from our grandchildren to do so–making the loans.
I will submit as well, as a public minded citizen who detests most banks and our banking system in general, for reasons I have articulated at great length, that you can pay off student loans with other loans which CAN be discharged in bankruptcy. If you are willing to sacrifice a house, you can use a second or third mortgage. You can use credit cards and lines of credit.
This is a poor solution, and yet, remarkably, still better than a Terminator-like debt that follows you to the very edge of the grave. Ethically, you can assume not one of the entities making these loans wants you anywhere but on your knees.
An actually Liberal Democrat Party would recognize this. But of course the Democrats have become an elitist anti-Populist Party which actually serves the interests only of a power hungry elite who are quite willing to use any rhetoric, to pander to anyone who will listen, in the full confidence that no one will ever hold them accountable for servicing the constituencies–blacks, the poor and working classes, the cause of peace–which they claim to value.
How else to explain their enthusiasm for importing millions of competitors for scarce jobs, which can only make them harder to find for native-born Americans, and make them pay less?
How else to explain the wars Obama and Hillary have started, which have only damaged our national security?