It has been said that two things are absolutely invariable in life, and that is death and taxes, which is absolutely true, no matter how primitive or how civilized your culture is, you will as a matter of course have to pay some sort of tribute for being part of it, voluntarily or not, and your physical body will die. In today's world, we can now safely add to those words of wisdom for most of today's generation: student loans. As reported by consumerfinance.gov: "The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau estimates that outstanding debt is approaching $1.2 trillion as of May 2013." This amount of student debt exceeds the amount of total credit card debt and is second only to mortgage debt, where in the case of mortgages, at least that debt is securitized by the homes themselves which have intrinsic value.
Since at no point in America's history, have so many students had so much debt, we don't know for a certainty how it will end, but we can almost say with certainty that it will not end well. This means that the whole issue of student loans will eventually come home to roost, to which there will be some winners and some losers. The winners, at least initially, will be the schools themselves, which have reaped lion's shares of profits and growth on the backs of young adults that clearly do not have a real comprehension of what they signed up for and their attendant financial responsibilities to it. Also, in the winner groups are the auxiliary employees of these schools as well as the businesses that are the beneficiaries of more people attending college, in addition to the banks and student loan lenders such as Sallie Mae. The losers, are the students, especially the ones that don't even get a graduate degree, next would be those that get a graduate degree but in actuality never really use it or under-utilize it in their employment, and finally the losers would also be all other businesses that would have seen dollars earned by those that once were collegiate students, instead of being spent on their goods and wares, are instead siphoned off to service their student debt.
Then there is the final loser of all and that always is the entity that is last in line, in this case, those stuck holding aging bonds of securitized student loans or similar that has no real collateral behind them and minimal appreciable value. Ultimately, those loans will default, or become discounted to such an amount that it will be the equivalent of a default, and then the Federal government will have to swoop in and clean things up, only the problem is, the Federal government, in essence, despite all the smoke and mirrors that they use day by day, is the people of the United States, so in point of fact, the people that were responsible in their financial matters as well as being good citizens, will pay for the faults of those that probably should have never attended school in the first place, while subsidizing those that made it their business to prey upon the young and gullible.