Wealthy people tend to be owners of businesses (directly or indirectly) that buy this labor, and they have a better negotiating position.

Young people with all the time in the world, an education, and no debt are also in a good position to establish new businesses. Having fewer of those reduces competition.

In essence, what we're talking about here is a massive wealth transfer from people seeking post-secondary education to those offering that education (sometimes public, sometimes private)... except (critically) the effects are future loaded.

We've indebted an entire generation, but it's an invisible anchor dragging on their economic aspirations.

If you ask me, we should do three things to fix this: (1) haircut absolute public loan amounts to a manageable amount in exchange for public service (more funding & new opportunities), (2) haircut private loans to a manageable amount (too bad, they shouldn't be able to offload risk to the public and keep their profits), funded by new taxes on underperforming (read: abnormally large numbers of deliquent loans) private loan vendors AND institutions generating said loans (both of whom benefited from originating poor quality loans), (3) continue efforts to tie government-guaranteed loan eligibility to positive outcomes (your graduates don't find jobs in their fields, your program(s) are no longer eligible for loan guarantees).

My thinking was more along the lines of: shouldn't the haves fund/enable the future success of the have nots instead of having them turn into (hopefully temporary) "have even less's"? In my mind it doesn't seem very sustainable to fuel education with debt even with government as creditor, especially in case should economic downturn occur...

I'm a university student myself and thanks to publicly funded universities I pay ~300 EUR per semester here (including an IMO quite generous public transit ticket). Obviously someone else is paying all the rest (plus the cost explosion is probably not nearly as bad here). The thought of having to personally indebt myself however, not knowing how things'll play out in this increasingly crazy world, seems quite scary. Looking at the situation of US students makes me all the more grateful to not be in their shoes.

I admit my original comment wasn't very well thought out, just something I wanted to vent (reading certain subreddits may have had something to do with this). There's obviously more forces at play concerning US higher education (and the welfare state in general), many of which I'm sure I can't see.

The lenders are rich. That's how lending works - you have money (are rich) so you lend it now for more later (get richer).