If you consider my situation to be the norm for a lot of poorer students, then you also start to see where the student debt crisis comes from and how it ties into the economic well-being for many people my age. There's a lot of people where they would have no choice but to dive straight into a lot of these predatory loans without prior education or finance knowledge and graduate knee deep in debt.
In another way, I was lucky that I graduated college with only $0 to my name. I could've graduated with -$40,000-80,000.
Eventually I landed on a great company that was willing to do that, but it was a difficult search as an entry-level developer. Would I have been able to pay off my debt? In 5-10 years maybe. That's still a large burden for people to bear, and we're in one of the better paying careers.
I believe that without proper financial aid, it may not be possible for everyone to pursue further education.
It's possible to do this, in fact, this is what I did; however, there is a lot more to a college degree than just the loans. You still need to be able to afford college living, food, expenses, etc., and anything which is not covered by loans each semester (which sometimes can be put on a private loan if you're fortunate enough to be able to get someone to cosign for you). I worked all throughout college and still barely made the cut. I had to stop going one year due to financial pressure but was fortunate enough to be hired for a paid co-op internship. This allowed me to save more and continue/finish my degree.
Just offering my perspective, you may or may not already see this.
Or do you just mean things like free education for all?
I don't doubt that it's substantially harder for people who lack financial resources, but it doesn't seem that much harder to me. It seems well within the realm of ordinary stuff that is is a bit more difficult. I admit that maybe there is an aspect of it that I don't understand, but what I see here is both you and this guy seeming to say it was difficult, but then you both managed to do it.
My perspective on a lot of this is that there is a whole generation of kids who went to college with the promise that what they majored in was irrelevant - that they should pursue their passion and things would just work out, because the important thing was going to college. So they majored in things like English, Philosophy, and Psychology. And then they graduated with those degrees expecting the world to pay them a comfortable six figure salary. Except that nobody wanted those skills. Even worse, they took on debt to do it. So upon graduation with a fine mastery of medieval English literature, they found themselves saddled with debt and no job prospects.
People like you and the other guy in this thread, on the other hand, did exactly the right thing. You took on a level of debt that was commensurate with the earning power of the degree you obtained. That's how this is supposed to work. You look at the value you can get out of the degree, and you compare that to the cost of obtaining it, and if a > b, you do it. That worked out for you not because you were lucky, but because you made the right decisions and you put in the effort required to realize the benefits.