The dark secret of the college-loan system is that it is not designed to help students pay for college and generate a reasonable interest-profit for the loan provider that will be paid off within a short period of time after the student begins working and receives a degree-enhanced salary. It is specifically designed to keep the graduate on a treadmill of debt that will ideally never be repaid.
This should be readily apparent upon considering the fact that there is presently $850 billion in outstanding student-loan debt in the United States. Since there is a total undergraduate enrollment of 14,473,884 students paying an average of $10,871 to attend college, the total annual cost of all college education is $157.3 billion. This means that past and present students are burdened with 5.4 times more debt than it costs to educate every single student currently enrolled in college. Since 44 percent of college students don’t graduate within six years, (and notice how the metric has climbed from four years to six years to artificially raise the graduation rate), the debt is 10 times the cost of educating a single national graduating class.