A lot of kids are essentially forced. Maybe not with a gun, but there is strong societal and familial pressure to get into the best school that they can, and that’s engrained into them from a pretty early age. They are taught that their value as a human being is heavily dependent on academic success.
Then, the people who raised them, and who they trust the most, tell them to sign on whatever dotted line is in front of them. The finances take care of themselves later! The administrators act as though it’s business as usual. The student is their proxy to government guaranteed money.
Since student loans can’t be discharged, it’s not even that banks relax their standards. It’s much worse than that. They’re now financially incentivized to give out as much debt as they possibly can. The more they lend, the more they are guaranteed to profit.
Money is free, so schools raise their prices and hire more staff.
I don’t really blame the students at all. Most people are surprisingly financially illiterate, and 17 year olds are especially naive. Their brains are not fully formed. We don’t let them buy cigarettes or look at naked people, because we don’t trust them. Yet we throw them in this game with seasoned adult professionals who work with complex financial instruments for a living, and we somehow expect them to come out alive.
Sure, many individuals will navigate this just fine, but, predictably, those ones are lost in the noise when you measure populations.
The only thing that boggles my mind is the fact that we haven’t corrected it yet, and most of the current proposals sound like they will actually make the problem worse. Bernie wants to make tuition free! That sounds like a pre-emptive bailout on a blank check.
If you want to understand why people seem to be inexplicably bad with money, it’s important to realize that their brain doesn’t work like yours does. So any assumptions based on what you think is logical are worthless in furthering your understanding.