Can we start doing that with rent payments en masse? I really wish there was a big, organized campaign around this to force rental companies to stop charging these outrageous made-up numbers for rent based on "market value" (which they themselves set).

With student loan payments, I sympathize and hope they all ultimately get their loans forgiven, but ultimately I think the rental situation is the worse offender that's driving more of the issues that we're seeing today. I try to pay on my loans/debts religiously, even if I hate the idea of paying all this extra interest on top of it.

They will get their paychecks garnished, or tax return checks garnished.

I took out my student loans to get a teaching degree. I worked full time during school, but tuition at my public university was 10k$/year when I was making $16k. My state has effectively made it illegal to be transgender in a public school, so despite a devastating shortage in my area of expertise, I can no longer work in the career I took the loans out for. My option is now to take out more student loans to pay for a masters degree and hope that I’ll be able to save up enough to move out of state, because I want to do the thing that I love to do and am good at. I will be a debt slave for the rest of my life.

Before the concept of "tuition free classes" meant "it costs nothing", Britain was working with the idea of "anyone can take the class for free, but you have to pay a fee to take the final - and you can't pass the class without taking the final." Instead of having students take out loans and then something happens to them such that they can't pass the class or they get so far behind that they know they will fail the class, they make the decision a week or so before the class is over to take out the loan. With everyone moving to post-videos-auto-graded-homework-online-only, the only real per-student cost is grading the exams anyway.