05/18/2026
This is another example of why the Federal Government should not be in the business of providing student loans! There are too many arguments for why the Federal Government should not be in this business to list all of them here, but the biggest one is because of how inept the system has been run, we are facing a larger economic disaster than the housing or credit debacles of 2008!
**Update: In response to a question about this post, the primary issue that I’m addressing here is the complete lack of appropriate risk management by the government. Generally speaking, the government lends copious amounts of money for student debt without a competent risk management assessment beforehand. Could you imagine banks providing mortgages with such incompetent risk assessment before providing funds? Honestly, you should be able to imagine it because that’s what many banks did that caused the sub-prime lending collapse that led to the Great Recession in 2008. It’s a tough reality to accept, but not everyone should be able to borrow large amounts of funds for college if there is not a legitimate expectation that those funds can be repaid by the borrower. This is only setting the entire country up for another economic shock similar to 2008.
Americans are defaulting on their student loan debt at a record pace:
Delinquent federal student loan debt jumped +$12.2 billion in Q1 2026, to $171.4 billion, an all-time high.
This has officially surpassed the $166.8 billion peak recorded in Q4 2019.
At the same time, the proportion of seriously delinquent loans rose +0.7 percentage points, to 10.3%, the highest since Q1 2020.
This comes as 2.6 million borrowers defaulted in Q1 2026, followed by ~1.0 million in Q4 2025.
The average borrower entering default is now nearly 40 years old, up from 36.4 before the 2020 pandemic.
The US student loan crisis is intensifying.