A book published last year does a great job of explaining just how the current student loan and tuition crises came to be. It goes all the way back to the Sputnik launch. The number of policy mistakes and underhanded deals over the last 5 decades are legion. If there’s going to be debt forgiveness, the banks and the universities should be footing part of the bill, not the American tax payer.
The Debt Trap: How Student Loans Became a National Catastrophe by Josh Mitchell
(I have no connection to this person or book. I checked it out of my local library)