@djc it’s not trust me. you are right to think it’s weird. it works by more openly breaking a thing to create the conditions under which it can politically get fixed. under conventional loans, there’s no budgetary cost to overpaying colleges, because in theory and until recently in practice, in aggregate, whatever the state overpayed colleges was offset by an asset, student IOUs. there was no fiscal cost. 1/

@djc students failed to impose price discipline, but it was students who were on the hook for their failure to impose price discipline. the state could afford to let colleges prey. the victims were the students themselves, who could be made patsies, blamed for “their own poor choices”. 2/

@djc under SAVE, if the state fails to impose discipline, the state will face accelerating fiscal costs, on its own balance sheet. oddly but unfortunately, that’s a lot less politically tenable than pretending the predation was just arms-length, eyes-open freedom-of-contract by consenting just-barely-or-not-quite adults. /fin