Biden may have saved a lot of Democratic candidates with his student-loan-forgiveness decree, since that appears to have motivated many young voters to keep them in office. The suffering borrowers need relief, and many of them didn’t know what they were getting into when they agreed to finance their college degrees with federal loans.

Are the student debtors really so ignorant? In today’s Martin Center article, Joseph Warta argues that most of them are. Warta is far more financially savvy than are most student borrowers (he didn’t borrow until he was already a CPA, looking to finance his MBA) and yet he found the information provided to him about student loans to be woefully inadequate.

Warta writes, “One would think that, in the case of a loan for tens of thousands of dollars, the details would be abundantly clear. The repayment period, the interest rate, the origination fees, and other details are obviously important when ones borrows a large sum of money. But little of that information was easily available on either my university’s website or on the website of the Department of Education.”

The Biden bailout does not, of course, solve the problem. Warta recommends that the Department of Education treat students the same way mortgage companies treat their prospective borrowers: “Student loans ought to take a page from the mortgage industry’s playbook. Disclosures are the name of the game when one gets a mortgage. It is made painfully clear to borrowers exactly what their interest rate will be, and borrowers also receive an itemization of all the lender’s fees, an amortization schedule, information about the repayment period, and an estimate of the monthly payment. The student-loan industry, alarmingly, does very few of these things. It is far too easy to jump head-first into five or six figures of debt and hardly know how it happened.”

Until the blessed day when we get the government out of college lending, we should follow Warta’s advice and insist that students considering college loans be made fully aware of the costs and consequences of borrowing.