Jenna Robinson of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy has an interesting piece in Clarion Call recounting her personal experience with government-backed student loans. Jenna and her friends spent a good deal of their loan money on non-school related activities, such as vacations, concert tickets, and off-campus apartments. She concludes:
My friends and I didn't really cause the student loan crisis. In the grand scheme, our dalliances were a drop in the bucket. But we did make bad decisions. We misused taxpayer money, accrued years' worth of debt and postponed adulthood's important financial lessons to have a good time. Now that the college-loan business is in trouble, perhaps Congress will mend its ways and no longer permit these excesses to continue. Students who receive today's scaled-back loans should be better off as a result.
Read more here.