Belated response. US Govt forfeited their leverage. They made two big changes. First, they subsidized higher ed, tuition was set mostly by fiat. Second, they stopped handling student loans, allowed banks to raise interest rates, excluded student loans from bankruptcy, moving all the risks of lending onto the borrower.

Said another way, we used to treat education as a public good and mostly paid for it. Now its a racket for Wall St to bind students in usury.

There are so many other examples in our society. Privatizing prisons. The school to prison pipeline. Privatizing water. War profiteering.

It's just goofball Reaganomics run amok, aka Freedom Markets (tm).