There are simple, go forward solutions that are specifically

ignored because they are politically unpalatable to the non profit education lobby. The best is the Gainful Employment concept. This measures the debt burden upon graduation of a student with an assumed reasonable amortization table against the actual earnings of students who borrowed money By School By Degree program. The data is all there as it has been collected for years as this was first implemented for For Profit school 8+ years ago by Obama.

When a program at a school "failed" the gainful employment rule, the school had one obligation and two choices:

Obligation: Rebate tuition back to students who borrowed too much Title IV money and de facto "overpaid" for their degree, because all data suggests they cannot successfully repay their US Government Student Loan

Choices: (1) Adjust tuition of the specific program downward so that future students do not "overpay" and thus "over borrow" Title IV to fund pursuing that program at that school; or (2) Teach out the program (i.e. shut it down) as no more Title IV funds would be available for prospective students of the program at that school. But they would remain available to students of programs that do "pass" the Gainful Employment test - meaning the typical student who borrows and graduates has a reasonable chance to pay down her or her debt.

Now when Trump came aboard, it went away because it was never implemented across all schools. The language was limited such that the testing was more or less limited to For Profit schools and non-profits (private or state schools) were exempted. Rather than fight to implement across all schools, Trump Education Dept simply stopped it completely. We are back to only limiting or stopping to provide Title IV funds to schools when (1) a very large percentage of students in an annual cohort (so class of 2018) stop paying on student loans 5 years later - so way after the fact, and nothing specific to a program and low career prospect programs get "helped" by high prospect programs; or (2) the school does not provide adequate proof of the schools financial health or compliance on various rules (audits to even reveal this are very lax).

Biden wants to reinstitute Gainful Employment right now for For Profit colleges and declare victory on "solving the problem". Needless to say, as was the case 10 years ago, the non-profits are cheering this as they want less competition for students and gladly attribute the whole debt problem to For Profit schools. But most of the dog For Profits are gone as they were weeded out successfully by Obama and most of the school failures from 2014-2020 were For Profits (and much of that debt has already been written off post school bankruptcy). There are not nearly as many For Profits around to blame. And even with them dramatically shrunk (University of Phoenix still exists but enrollment down over 80% from peak) the survivors have honed their focus on highly vocational programs (like UTI and Auto Mechanics or Chamberlain and Nursing or so many others focused on Pharmacy Techs or Medical Billing - where grads can pay off loans and programs will pass Gainful Employment if re-instituted).

Bottom Line: We should re-institute Gainful Employment testing for For Profits and Non Profits. Of course, this is loathed, especially by academia which fears financially encouraging students not to major in humanities subjects. Thankfully, this is already happening in the market place as students learn more, but many still pursue school degrees for which they have little prospect of paying down their debt. What is really needed is some combination of (1) Students who need to borrow to pursue such university programs get grants not loans - because on average they can't afford loans (2) Lower the tuition for programs whose career prospects are objectively worse - why should someone pay the same for a music degree or fine arts degree as an engineer or accountant pays? The market place certainly values the professor's earning prospects outside of school differently. Schools don't want to do this, but Gainful Employment would force the tuition reduction lest the program be eliminated due to ineligibility for Title IV loans (3) Fewer schools offering these lower vocation prospect programs. This again could result from Gainful Employment implementation across all schools or happen as it sort of is now as private and state schools everywhere cut programs with low enrollment which, in many cases, involve programs like fine arts and music or German, etc. How many state schools in Ohio need to offer a full slate? We need to encourage or have policies that promote consolidation of low vocation prospect programs into fewer schools where each program can have the best teachers, best state funding, the best grant solicitation (because they need it) and yes fewer overall jobs for some of the professors.

The other good option, employed by Brazil, is make the school share in bad debt as incurred. The money gets clawed back out of future Title IV funding. The only problem here is that schools will not be proactive and will fail left and right after the fact.

The worst option is to enable what we have.