I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

The idea here is to capture attention (short, punchy letter), provide all the ammunition a staffer needs to make a phone call asking what the hell is going on (the attachments), and the targeting information.

Send 'em hard copy, to both the DC and the local district office. Wait two days, send an email. Wait a day and call, asking to speak with someone in reference to same. You won't get the Congressman, of course, but if you get a competent staffer they'll know how to look into the matter and make people uncomfortable enough to do better. Get someone who's worked in the district a few years and they probably play tennis with someone at the University.

These offices are heavily dedicated to constituent service. If you get their attention and make it easy for them to investigate, some staffer will pick this as a lay-up "good deed for the day."

Congress doesn't have jurisdiction, of course, but any public institution steps to when the office calls. They'll pay attention, and they may very well look harder for some discretion to fix this.

The overall system is, of course, stupid. That won't get any better, it's a set of compromises among reasonable sounding concerns that have amounted to a Kafka-esque impossibility. But there is a lot of discretion in the joints -- if you can make someone notice this particular glitch, it might get fixed.

True, the debt seems a lot smaller in that context. I'm (very slightly) optimistic that the new rules which cap student loan payments as a % of income and also subsidize public service work will make this burden a little lighter and less intimidating.

But at bottom, it's still a terrible problem. Not everyone is a financial wizard, and after an unpleasant brush with debt as a youth I've been largely allergic to it since. It's disappointing that people who want to take a fiscally conservative approach and pay up front or as they go are finding that becoming ever more impractical, thereby limiting their economic opportunity and productivity. Although many schools offer scholarships and suchlike, they're far from transparent.

The purpose of the student loan system to help extend credit to people who are otherwise less creditworthy. It's not a perfect system but it sorta works. In your case, you said you maxed out your credit cards. Presumably you managed your credit effectively aside from that, and then paid it off. If so, your Fico score should be high enough to qualify for a loan outside the federal student loan guarantee program.

Why not just take out loans and go to a state school? I went to a good engineering state school in New York and many of my classmates got excellent jobs after that. The tuition is only $5k per year. Total tuition and other expenses can be easily paid off within a couple of years with an engineering job. The interest rate is only like 5% for people with OK credit.

Regarding credit cards: It definitely does not make sense to use credit cards to pay for tuition, because the APR is very high compared to student loans.

Edit: Regarding the amount you can take out in private loans: Discover lets you take out like 50k per semeseter. This is way more than enough.