The fact is, loans are a necessity for paying for college nowadays, and a college degree is the de facto doorkeeper to a middle-class lifestyle. However, the average private college costs an average of $22,218. What’s more, the amount of scholarships available—especially to Joe Suburban Teenager—is nowhere near the demand. Accordingly, the amount of student loan debt in this country is immense—$477 billion. (Contrast this, however, with $5.6 billion a month for the Iraq war.)

In most every other industrialized country, higher education is at least partially paid for by the government (though this is changing with the current laissez-faire turn in Europe). In America, though, we don’t have a parliamentary system that, for good or ill, factors in everyone’s needs: We have lobbyists, and student loan corporations pay handsomely for representation in Washington. Accordingly, student loan lenders enjoy some of the most favorable conditions in the industry. Thanks to a bill signed by Clinton in 1997, student loan debt, unlike consumer debt, can never be discharged. They can even take payments out of your social security—and this holds true both for the wholly inadequate subsidized federal loans and for the private loans most students wind up having to get. What we essentially have is a system where a small number of companies are siphoning off a lifetime’s wages in exchange for fronting the opportunity to earn them in the first place—a postindustrial version of debtor’s prison.

These have a very real effect on people’s lives. While not everyone is so unfortunate as to be saddled with debt, those with high loans wind up paying in interest what they would otherwise be investing in the economy—or their own further education. Student loans put a dent in home buyers’ ability to qualify for reasonable mortgages. Bureaucratic cock-ups ruin people’s credit. In the end, it seems to be more sensible to go to a lower-tier state school—or even bypass college entirely—than to follow the “traditional” middle-class pursuit of high educational achievement. Furthermore, for those saddled with student loan debt, monthly payments make it more difficult to get married, buy a house, and raise children. “Family values,” my ass.

But the government isn’t the only one who’s been bought. . The schools have payola found themselves immersed in the midst of a payola scandal. To quote Generation Debt author Anya Kamenetz, “Lenders and schools have/had deals whereby schools would push students to a certain lender or lenders in exchange for kickbacks from the lenders.”

The fact is that the student loan industry hasn’t been playing by the rules for years—and in the end, this makes us all poorer as the middle class’s money is sucked into the coffers of a few corporations. The way out of it is to put more pressure on politicians than the lobbyists do to get candidates to promise to change the system. Increase subsidized loans. Lower interest rates. And take the private lenders out back and shoot them. In the wake of the payola scandal, , the Democratic-led House has already set an example by passing the College Cost Reduction Act of 2007, funded by reducing subsidies to student-loan companies. We’d like to see the Senate—and the presidential candidates—follow suit.