Debt 101: our system now saddles students with loans that make low-paying but meaningful work impossible. Here's how to fix it.

• Author: Heilemann, John

Since its debut the night before the Clinton inauguration, Fox television's new baby-buster series "Class of '96" has been called a lot of things--many flattering, some critical, even a few unprintable in a family magazine. But no one seems to have noticed that "Class of '96" is, incidentally, a legacy of the Great Society. Not that the show's treatment of campus life is especially liberal or PC. Instead, it's that "Class of '96" owes its plausibility to an idea hatched by Lyndon Johnson in 1965: rederally subsidized college loans.

The predictably pimple-free characters that populate Havenhurst, the ersatz Ivy League school where the show is set, don't all hail from "Beverly Hills 90210." The hero is working-class Irish; another is a poor, black Brooklynite; others are resolutely middle class. If their fictional financial aid files ever get opened on the air, you can bet student loans will be there in abundance. And for the real-life counterparts of students like these, government-guaranteed student loan programs are essential to paying for private and public universities alike.

According to the College Scholarship Service, the average student today finishes school $10,000 in debt. For graduate students, the figure is a crushing $35,000. This level of indebtedness among young adults is unprecedented in American history. Indeed, for all the media hubbub about twenty-somethings, the one thing that really sets them apart from their elders isn't Nirvana or lumberjack shirts, but coming out of college deep in hock. Forget Generation X. Call them Generation Debt.

There is sad irony in this. The loans which once promised to open doors for young people have instead ended up trapping them inside what Generation X author Doug Coupland calls "Student Loan Prison." Having taken the money to pay for a degree, students are frequently forced to make a bitter compromise: They must, after college, give up doing socially useful but ill-paid work, like teaching or public-interest law, and settle for uninspiring jobs that bring in enough to cover hefty monthly loan payments. For others (usually the less well-off), the fear of Student Loan Prison has them thinking twice about going to college at all.

Fortunately, there's a straightforward way of reforming the student-loan system that will make it more efficient, more accessible, and less punitive to those who want to chase their ideals before jumping on the fast track. And Bill Clinton knows all about it. But trouble looms. The interests with a stake in keeping the current system are circling, and Clinton's simple idea for fixing the loan program is bound up with his entirely admirable--but infinitely more complicated--plan for a sweeping national service scheme. There's a simpler way to fix the problem, whether national service ever...