The whole point of student loans is to make a university education universally available. It's an attempt to avoid the regime of the old days when only the children of nobles and members of the clergy (also usually children of nobility) could go to university. Whenever I hear people advocating for an end (or a severe curtailment) of student loans, I have to wonder what people ought to be expected to do in order to achieve upward mobility.

I'm not arguing against student loans, in general, I'm arguing against our specific instantiation of the concept. As others in this thread have pointed out, a university education is not actually that expensive (roughly $10k/year for a state university; but even less for people who can't afford that, since they would qualify for grants, financial aid, etc.). That is surely out of reach for some people, so what should we do about it? In my opinion, the option we have chosen is the most insane option you could choose (or nearly so; providing free university education to whoever wants it would be more insane). There are so many perverse incentives. We've given 18 year olds the ability to take on hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt that they have no way of getting out of. This means that the other party in this transaction (the university) has no incentive to make sure that they're providing an education that A) provides real value, and B) is cost effective. And then we've decided that our children and grandchildren should hold the risk when this whole thing explodes.

It's nuts.

Especially given that we already have a way for students to earn a free university education by serving in the military. And if we wanted a sane system of increasing access to student loans, it would probably look something like garnishing up to 10% of a student's wages for up to 10 years, after which the student can file for bankruptcy to clear out any remaining loan balance. And get the government out of securing student loans. Students would still carry a significant burden, but lenders and institutions would also have to pay a lot of attention to the economic benefit of their offering, and it would leave me and my descendants out of this whole thing.

There’s plenty of trade schools that can give careers to those not fortunate to get a sizeable scholarship and who would need to take out unreasonable student loans. For those few I’d recommend getting a career and saving up some money before trying to pay their way through college instead of having their student loan loom over their heads for most of their lives and potentially ruining their credit score with a couple of missed payments.

There are plenty of people who would do well in science or engineering programs that aren't prodigious enough for a full ride scholarship. Telling those people to go to trade school is a huge waste of their economic potential.

At the same time, there are plenty of extremely bright people who take a scholarship to study a subject with approximately zero real world applicability. That often doesn't matter though, because they made it through and are now able to signal their status to employers.

I happen to own a copy of Caplan's The Case Against Education and I don't buy his arguments for trade schools. People go to school to signal status, mostly because humans engage in assortative mating, and trades offer money rather than status.

Besides that, many trades are very physically taxing and tend to cause injuries which result in chronic pain later in life. Who wants that? The epidemic of suicides and drug overdoses in the US is occurring precisely within the populations of older, injured workers who were essentially forced into retirement.