politics

One at a time, you mean. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=rotating%20villain

The US can look at how other countries, that don’t outright provide free education, do it instead of reinventing the wheel.

Getting rid of the discharge protection is only a small part of it.

It’s more important to set a legal maximum for college tuition for accredited institutions.

Then make any subsidies and funds contingent being accredited.

Lastly make federal loans contingent on enrollment to accredited institutions, with the additional benefit of being able to cap the loan amount at a level correlated to the legal maximum tuition (not to be confused with setting at the tuition level because living expenses need to be taken into account as well).

Make the interest rate sub 1%, because the government shouldn’t profit off of you as it is a service and do away with private middle men that administer the loans, instead establishing a special loan administration agency.

This will have as effect that institutions either get in line or lose all government funds and a significant portion of enrollments.

If you then also manage to uphold a uniform quality level that you regularly inspect at the accredited institutions, you’ll end up with a clear, affordable choice of quality education v. unknown quality education that may or may not be a huge waste of non-publicly provided money.

ETA:

You can even take it a step further and follow more examples from abroad in terms of acceptance.
Where you aim to get to a situation that everyone that applies with the pre-requisite prior education credentials, gets accepted.

The way this is often done abroad is with a centralized application process managed by the government, in which you indicate your top 3 preferred colleges, the portal verifies your prior education (as it's centrally registered) and then enrolls you in order of preference.
For some studies, like law school, med school and psychology they'll have more applicants than available spots, and in those cases it's decided by lottery with slightly weighted chances based on your grade average.
The end result is that the vast majority of people automatically get accepted and the ones that don't get in via the lottery are almost guaranteed to be placed the following year.

This solves the whole minority/legacy/etc. acceptance debacle, makes applying for schools less like applying for a job with writing essays and stuffing your resume with a bunch of extracurriculars and in the process makes the accredited institutions even more attractive compared to the potential hold outs that keep doing things the old fashioned way.

Yeah, you have this right. If we do undo the bankruptcy laws, though, we do still need to do something to support students who don't qualify for credit. Otherwise we will be making a university education even more difficult for less privileged people to attain.

We would probably need to expand grant programs to compensate for the extra barrier.

Why not go a step further and make huge education mandatory? We used to consider high school optional, but eventually we realized the immense value that comes with an educated society.

I agree in principle, but not in reality. We will never get student loan relief if we shoot for "perfect".

Yes, schools will raise prices in response, if they don't have to share any responsibility for the loans. Every time we get some way to enable students to pay for college, schools raise the price more. It's a fact, and I agree that they will be dicks again if they can.

But, that does not exclude half measures to give relief now. We can have an imperfect non-solution now, and go for the long term solution later if it helps people get by.

Lenders should have to do things like credit-worthiness checks on students.

Impossible. 18 year olds don't have extensive credit histories, if they have any. It's simply an impossible thing to evaluate.

Reconciliation only needs a simple majority. All democrats plus Kamala to break the tie.

Go on a public tirade against Sinema and Manchin. Ads, Rallies, Press tours. Send Biden town to town all over Arizona and West Virginia. Explain what Build Back Better does and what Manchin and Sinema were killing. If you had to make back room deals with them. I can be your best friend or your worst enemy.

They will not do anything of the sort. Biden was picked by the billionaires and corporations specifically because he said nothing would fundamentally change. He was picked because he said he would veto Medicare for all.

TLDR: Republican Politicians (Fascists)are evil. Democratic Politicians (Conservatives) are objectively better but it’s a low bar to be better than Republicans.

In some of their omnibus spending packages they had leverage.

I'm not saying they had carte Blanche. But they certainly had leverage.

Yeah, the same organization that, in 2000, voted on party lines to quit counting citizen's ballots because their party had votes at the moment. They are a sham organization right now and have been for a long time.

Maybe you're right. I admit I'm a bit naive on some of the economic implications.

I feel like allowing bankruptcy would punish the dumb borrowers somewhat, but NOT punish them with crippling debt for life, as is currently the case. It would also punish loaners (including the government) for lending money to people for fairly useless degrees who would never be able to pay them back.