Because taking on a loan planning to default on it is fraud and you can be prosecuted for that.

And how is the prosecution going to prove you intended to default on it?

By showing that you made no reasonable effort to pay it off. They’ll just ask why didn’t you work and pay it off as normal.

What do you think at the moment stops graduates taking out a credit card, blowing 100k on it on holidays and then declaring bankruptcy? The same fraud laws as would stop you from clearly never intending to pay off your student debts.

I doubt they would give you the whole amount up front if it were dischargeable, so your clock is wrong.

It might be possible to declare bankruptcy a year or two before graduating still. Not sure what employers would make of it. Maybe they'd like the mercenary attitude.

> I doubt they would give you the whole amount up front if it were dischargeable

This is basically the entire point.

Right, that's why I pointed it out to the commenter that I replied too, they wrote as if the bankruptcy would start when you took the loan out...

Ah, gotcha. Makes sense now.

Generally, you don't make payments on student loans until after you graduate. That means you have years to spend the money before you have to worry about refusing to pay

this .... so much this.

All of which, I guess, says that if student loans can be trivially discharged in bankruptcy, then we should expect that non-government loans will quickly go away, and government loans will start to have a ~100% default rate

(or this judge's decision won't become universally applicable, or the law will be changed to circumvent it)

hot take: private educational loans largely going away would be a good thing for education pricing

I think it's the government-guaranteed loans going away that would actually be the good thing for education pricing.