This is a catch-22 though, if you are ignorant enough to not realize it is irresponsible, you are not the person who is going to be waiting a few years to research the market and make an informed decision. The people whose job it is to stop semi-ignorant people from making a poor uninformed decisions, are the same loan officers rubber stamping loans.

Not everyone can magically be smart enough to truly understand what they are getting into, and what ramifications it will have on their later economic life. What is your advice for the people who aren't doing more research ahead of time? "just get smarter dummy" ?

I remember being told that you were wasting your life if you didn't start college immediately after graduating from high school, and employers would look down on your resume as some sort of failure.

You're talking to the wrong people. A child looks to the advice of their parents, and if their parents say go to university, that's what happens.

Maybe go to community college for a bit as an alternative and figure out if it's right for you before taking out a large loan.

Most middle class kids coming out of school see college as an extension of the education required to compete in the market - they're also told that trade schools are a rip off and community college is for underachievers, so they end up diving into university before giving that option any real critical examination.

I imagine upper class kids just get their education bank-rolled by their parents so who cares. And I didn't live the life of a lower class kid (my family was middle or lower middle) so I can't speak to their experience - but that middle class suburbanite definitely isn't going to get a check from their parents to cover their full schooling.

Where I lived as a middle class teenager at least - a generic suburb in SoCal - I, and every other student, was told the community college we had has an excellent program to transfer students into a 4 year college with minimal debt. It definitely takes effort as a community to ensure graduating high school students understand their options in full.

I find that the community college grada are better professionals than the kids who jumped into uni because they didn't know anything and grasped at straws. It's an expensive but revealing mistake that shows which young adults have good judgement and self awareness.

Great, if people were that smart we wouldn't have had the 2008 housing crash. You have to make these structures idiot safe or the idiots destroy the economy.