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I'm sure it could never work. But I've thought for some time that the just action for some fraction of student loans would be to transfer the obligations from the student to the university, for any student who filed for financial aid and was required to take remedial sub-"college" level algebra by the university that they were enrolled in. Like the university as an organization knew (1) that person has no way of understanding exponential functions and therefor compounding interest (2) would need to undertake a compounding loan in order to pay for the tuition. If you know a person does not have the capacity to understand the considerations of a contract, I find it highly unethical to enter into such a contract with them. It also seems preposterous to be charging US university level tuition for material that's available from a $2.50 workbook at your local grocery store checkout. I've laterally seen students learning to reduce fractions in a top 50 usnews ranked university.
I’ve long held the conspiracy theory that ‘cancellation’ discourse at the level of elected officials is mostly just fighting about who has to eat the cost of these bad loans- if they don’t get paid back, someone has to.
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