I've agreed with your general direction in this thread, but here you've tied yourself in a knot. If the un-"real loans" you cite weren't available, far fewer people would be willing to attend college, prices would fall, and far less would be loaned and spent on education. In other words, without the distortions introduced by lobbyists and politicians, all this wonderful education debt wouldn't exist. So we have indeed identified a case in which lenders "through the application of their profits can alter those systems so that more debt is required to survive."