 But there's a lot of bad things could happen then. We have mortgages. We have back rent due, everything else. But how did we get into this mess with the student loan debt? In 2010, the student loan debt was less than $500 billion. Geez, what happened? Well, in that same year, the Obama and the Biden administration, they eliminated the federal guaranteed loan program in the private sector, said they were going to cut out the middleman and save some money.