HUG Your Student Debt, Inc.^™

As lawmakers stare down the barrel of a potential trillion-dollar deficit, they’ve already started looking for ways to stanch the bleeding. The F-35 program, a trillion-dollar boondoggle of a weapons platform that only occasionally works, isn’t really on the table. Nor are the massive tax cuts that forged the present budget shortfall. No, where legislators intend to recoup some scratch is in capping access to federal student loans for graduate students.

Amid America’s colossal student debt problem, an Ivy League school is providing an example of how institutions can help.

Beginning next school year, Brown University will eliminate all student loans in its undergraduate financial aid packages, replacing them with scholarships. Following a $30 million fundraising effort launched in September, Brown administrators announced this week that 2,087 donors contributed toward the goal, and that the school—located in Providence, Rhode Island—plans to raise $90 million more to sustain the scholarship giving.

Late last year, congressional Republicans passed a $1.5 trillion tax cut, which delivered the lion’s share of its benefits to the wealthy and corporations. The GOP did not justify this policy on the grounds that all corporate shareholders and trust-fund hipsters deserved to have their wealth increased. Rather, the party argued that, however one felt about making the rich richer, the tax cuts would ultimately benefit all Americans by increasing economic growth and lowering unemployment.

Eighty-three percent of people ages 22 to 35 with student debt who haven't bought a house yet blame their educational loans.

Owning a home, the most common way Americans build wealth, can become a distant dream for many crushed by student debt.

In the late 1990s, Ed McKinley fell in love with a $65,000 house by a lake in New Hampshire.

The owners let him move in early and pay rent until the buying process was completed.

Inside his new home, McKinley installed a modern stove, painted the walls and began to redo the floors.

The American student loan crisis is often seen as a problem of profligacy and predation. Wasteful colleges raise tuition every year, we are told, even as middle-class wages stagnate and unscrupulous for-profit colleges bilk the unwary. The result is mounting unmanageable debt.

There is much truth in this diagnosis. But it does not explain the plight of Liz Kelley, a Missouri high school teacher and mother of four who made a series of unremarkable decisions about college and borrowing. She now owes the federal government $410,000, and counting.