It's designed by the US Government to bring in massive, on-going funding to help fill in the red ink in the entitlement programs now that those are no longer funding sources to steal from (entitlements used to produce persistent surplus funding the politicians used to steal from for decades). That's why they'll never allow it to be dischargeable. Their margin on the loans is de facto 100%: it's all magic printed dollars or otherwise taxpayer dollars (makes no difference to them).
Massive? Even before COVID and the lockdowns (and the pause on repayment), the student loan program was operating at a _loss_.
The Dept. of Education has presumed (because they're incompetent AND corrupt) the program would be net positive but only to $114B over 25 years -- that's an average $4.5B per year. In 2019, the federal government spent $4.4T, so the _expected_ return from student loans would have only been 0.1% of the federal budget.
That money couldn't fill squat.
----
"From 1997 to 2021, the Education Department estimated that payments from federal direct student loans would generate $114 billion for the government. But the GAO found that, as of 2021, the program has actually cost the government an estimated $197 billion.
"A percentage of that shortfall, $102 billion, stems from the unprecedented federal student loan payment pause that began under the CARES Act in 2020."
https://www.npr.org/2022/07/29/1114560119/student-loan-progr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_United_States_federal_bud...