What you want and what you can afford can be two very different things. Just because you can get a big loan does not mean you can afford it. For myself, the purpose of going to college was to get a piece of paper to get my first software development job. I didn't care if the college looked nice, offered all sorts of amenities, etc. I went to a local state university and commuted.
Too many people have been brainwashed into going college for the non-education part of the 'college experience' without understanding the long-term implications of coming out of school with an enormous debt load. Continuing to allow 17-21 year old kids to sign up for these loans is just a scam.
This is not true. Federal student loans have an annual cap and overall cap, anything above that has to be financed with private student loans, which are not guaranteed by the government and have much higher interest rates. They are generally co-signed for by a parent, who is on the hook if the student cant pay.
edit: this is further broken down into subsidized and unsubsidized loans (the former the government pays the interest on while you are in school, the latter they dont): https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/types/loans/subsidized-unsubsid...
The flip side of this is that student loans are guaranteed by the federal government, and when tuition goes up, so does loan availability. If financing is guaranteed no matter the cost, then no one should be shocked when customers lose their price sensitivity.
It's also important to keep in mind that the graduates coming out of college in the time period mentioned have entered the most challenging job market for new job seekers in 70 years. It's hardly fair to expect them to be able to live up to promises they made in the mid 2000s when everyone running the economy promised it was in great shape, while those same people were building the house of cards that collapsed on the millenial generation. There's lots of blame to go around, but very little of it should land on the students who took out these loans.