you’ve identified a a thing as American without looking at how the rest of the world operates

You’ve restricted your understanding of the world to the US/UK and its colonial enclaves. FFS, how do you think Cuba is pumping out so many extremely talented doctors per capita? It’s not via the American debt-for-access model.

It sounds like you’re angry at the American system

Hard not to personally experience the machine that grinds your bones and not feel a little resentful for being shoved through it. But more broadly, it has been eye-opening to travel and talk to people outside the American financing system and learn how other countries produce large numbers of professionals who aren’t crippled by debt on graduation day.

Other countries may do some things than the USA, but a lot of the basic structure that you complained out is more universal than you think.

The debt-financing model is not simply an American invention, but a very recent American invention. As in, barely ten years separate the cohort who got larded up with debt and the generation that didn’t. It came about very quickly and as a coordinated set of reforms orchestrated by privately funded think tanks primarily based in the United States.