Adding "$1 trillion in student loans to the federal balance sheet over a decade" is a result of direct lending, ie cutting out the middleman. It is also saving the taxpayer money to the tune of $70B over ten years.
An awfully expensive $70B over ten years, I think.
The savings of $70B comes from eliminating a profit layer that was enjoyed by the banks.
The government insured the loans before and after the change in 2010. So the taxpayer was on the hook for losses. Now it is still on the hook for losses, but also benefits from profits.
The $70B is simply from cutting out the middleman.
Will it have been worth all this damage to prevent the eeeeeeviiiiil profiters? It really already wasn't, and the accounting for the evil of our current policy is only going to get worse.
Don't deal in the fuzzy-wuzzies of how wonderful education is in a perfect world. Deal with the world in front of you, the one on the news, the one generating a trillion dollars in crushing debt on those least able to pay it back. People are exploiting your willingness to hide in glib, pretty generalities.
So now we have : debt slavery where your debtor is actually the one making laws. This could be really good or really bad. Really good if it is decided that transferring the education debt to all taxpayers is deemed acceptable, really bad if the government gets into the business of debt collection from people with no assets (ie. actual slavery).
No one is ever forced to borrow any kind of student loan. Using language like "debt slavery" is really over the top
Maybe there was a lack of alternatives available to them, or at the very least they didn't themselves believed other good alternatives existed (the same as with student loans), but it still required them to agree to it.