I would argue though that the borrowers were not dumb. An entire generation of people told them “you have to do whatever it takes to go to college so you can get a good job” - that was a lie, and the people who told the lie should be the ones punished. The kids who trusted their parents, teachers, and government about this didn’t do anything wrong.
The data simply does not support that hypothesis.
The majority of degrees are in valuable and complex fields, the meme of everyone getting degrees in underwater basket weaving are not based in reality.