It's terrible that people are just now realizing how terrible these student loans were. When I graduated high school in 2005, I subsequently went to a university for Political Science degree. I took student loans out thinking I was going to get a nice, high-paying job right out of school to pay them off rather quickly.
I was very wrong. After a few years, I was fed up with barely making $40,000 doing menial office work. I enrolled in an EMT program for $1000 and made $60,000 with OT my first year and paid a nice chunk of my loans off. I then became a Paramedic, which only cost me $7,000. I averaged about $100,000-110,000 a year.
After that, I went to nursing school at a community college, which ended up being FREE with scholarships. I'm now looking at about $200,000 this year. Over the years, I've worked with a large number of people who went into EMS or nursing after getting degrees that weren't very high paying. Most of them were able to pay their loans off quickly with the higher salaries they were getting in the medical field.
The point of my story is that I wish I had just done EMS and nursing to begin with. A total of around $10,000 in education costs to make six figures any only work 3 days a week versus $80,000 in student loans for a career that paid insulting wages. I wish more students consider the long-term ramifications of taking out loans for degrees that don't pay very well.