It's easy to criticize federal student loan programs, but there's an even bigger problem: people are choosing majors that aren't valuable in the market, and are later somehow surprised they are worse off than when they started. Weird.
It's not "people," it's children.
Children who are told by every single successful adult they trust that they need to go to college and that it doesn't matter what they get the degree in, just that they have one.
The fact that you have to spend 4 years to get a bachelors in something is complete BS. Padded time. Universities really don't pander to the 'market', they are their own market and you being prepared for the workforce is an afterthought based upon how much your instructor cares about it.
The only times these becomes exceptions is in Engineering, Law, and Medicine. Things that have dedicated schoolings for them. It's still padded but they have an explicit direction that feeds into a market.
To issue an accreditation degree, time-wasting requirements must be satisfied. Accreditation requirements are effectively controlled by the customers, which are the universities that are already accredited. Those universities don't want competition to be able to offer students a better deal, with a cheaper degree or with a more-focused degree full of classes that are expensive to operate.
For example, consider a 4-year BS in Computer Science. It contains about 1 year of Computer Science, 1 year of vaguely-related things (physics, calculus, etc.) and 2 years of cheap filler nonsense that makes you less-educated than when you started.
Accreditation blocks any attempt to offer a full 4 years of actual value.
However, to the extent that a student is pursuing an education as a means to achieve employment and income, the value of a piece of knowledge to the student _is_ its value to the market.
I'm saying IF your main or only goal is career advancement, THEN the value of a college education to you is the same as the value of that education to the market.
If you have other goals then by all means major in Theater, Filipino Literature, Marine Biology, or whatever major best suits your goals.
The GP's point, in the post you replied to above, is that you should not expect, having done that, to be able to easily repay a $100k loan.
Maybe your point is that we should, as a society, revise our scheme for funding people's educations, so that the pursuit of degrees in less lucrative fields is not such a burden. And if so, maybe you're right.
The fact is, though, a lot of college students have no clear goals. Maybe they want a job after they get out but don't know what. Or maybe their parents just expect them to get a degree but haven't given them much guidance in choosing a major. If such a student chooses "Communications" or English Lit just because it seems easier or somewhat more interesting than a more technical field, and they just have vague expectations of being better able to find employment having finished their degree, I don't think it qualifies as much of a social good for the student to get that education. I certainly don't want to pay for it in my tax dollars.