While I agree with many of your points in principle, I think your rhetoric is a bit off. For one thing, I think it's ridiculous to even bring up Ivy League when discussing overall student debt. Ivy League's total enrollment is something like 100,000. Assuming every single freshman took a full debt load, thats 'only' 5 billion or so. The government report linked in the article states that in 2010-2011, $117B of student debt was generated. Ivy League doesn't even matter.
Furthermore, while its easy to criticize the students themselves - obviously many of them are not paragons of responsible spending, but it also kind of misses the point. For one thing it's easy to wave away and say 'many' students have shit they 'don't need', but how many really do? And how much is that really contributing. Without data, its just a gut feeling. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not. Because I can tell you that where I live, very few students have 42" TVs. Yes, we have smartphone and Macs, and some of us have video game consoles, but how much does this really add to our debt load? Certainly not trivial, but when you consider the average student debt is like 25k, you certainly can't say that the extra 4-6k on random gadgets is what is driving the problem. After all, if you can pay a 20k loan and avoid defaulting, you probably can also pay for a 25k load and avoid defaulting.
And finally, how does one even approach solving a systemic problem (it obviously is systemic) like this if all you do is place the blame on the actors. Clearly the problem is large enough for blame to be ladled on everyone.
Furthermore, while its easy to criticize the students themselves - obviously many of them are not paragons of responsible spending, but it also kind of misses the point. For one thing it's easy to wave away and say 'many' students have shit they 'don't need', but how many really do? And how much is that really contributing. Without data, its just a gut feeling. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not. Because I can tell you that where I live, very few students have 42" TVs. Yes, we have smartphone and Macs, and some of us have video game consoles, but how much does this really add to our debt load? Certainly not trivial, but when you consider the average student debt is like 25k, you certainly can't say that the extra 4-6k on random gadgets is what is driving the problem. After all, if you can pay a 20k loan and avoid defaulting, you probably can also pay for a 25k load and avoid defaulting.
And finally, how does one even approach solving a systemic problem (it obviously is systemic) like this if all you do is place the blame on the actors. Clearly the problem is large enough for blame to be ladled on everyone.