That, probably can and should be fixed. Set a minimum age for someone to take a college loan to say 21. Otherwise, a parent takes it and it's subtracted from a parents' social security check before it does from kid's. Then people will think twice. Maybe that's fair.

Good idea. I think kids in high school should also be shown some real stats about monetary outcomes from different degrees. Not BS marketing material from educational institutions, but actual statistics. The whole society would benefit if number of students in different fields would roughly match labor market demand.

how many people do you think even understand “actual statistics”? i was reading a study done by actuaries working at one of the largest reinsurers in the world, and they made conclusions based on confidence level values overlapping, which is a nontrivial mistake i identified within seconds. and these are actuaries, people who by and large, so understand statistics. how do you expect the average person to interpret any of it when they struggle to understand what a rate of change (inflation) is?

Yep, and kids also smoke, vape, do drugs, gamble, assault people, play too many video games, etc.

The answers lie in educating them to make good decisions, and be there to help when good decisions happen to turn out poorly. The current dilemma is largely due to provably bad decisions (by students, banks, universities, government).

Are student loans the most pressing "bad decision" we have as a society? Definitely not. Is it a very electable topic? Yep