Written by: Daniel Akst
Published by: The Wall Street Journal on 8/1/2021
MBA News Digest Comment: None.
Extracted Content: Who says American ingenuity is dead? No other nation could have invented and sustained anything like our Byzantine student loan system, with its immense cost, dizzying complexity and perverse incentives.
Launched with the best of intentions, the system has produced a human and financial catastrophe. Many former students have reasonable debts, but millions have no realistic hope of paying what they owe, proving once again the iron law of credit—that truly massive debts end up in the lap of taxpayers. The whole mess is the subject of two valuable new books.