Wow. Let millions of students suffer just so that I can make more money. Capitalism at its finest.
The government created this situation and is now essentially buying votes by stepping in to distort the market with this continued debt pause (which solves nothing, just kicks the can a little further down the road). No one on either side is attempting to do anything remotely rational about the situation and I'm not sure what you'd expect a company who had its business model turned on its head by questionable executive action to do except fight that executive action.
What does this mean? No one forced them to take these loans out. A fool and his money are soon parted.
As someone with student loans who remembers my thinking when taking them out, I can assure you that almost every 17-18 year old who is accessing a student loan meets your definition of a fool. There's simply no way for anyone to expect someone at that age to understand what they're doing, especially when there's such societal pressure to signal success in your age cohort by going to school.
The societal expectation of "successful kids go to college" mixed with the shortsighted government intervention of making these loans available to basically everyone is an absolute recipe for disaster.
I am against forgiveness of student loans but I think they should be dischargeable in bankruptcy. The idea that you can make such disastrous decisions so early in your life that you can never opt out of is patently unfair, but there needs to be a high personal cost to ejecting from the situation.