"What was powering and pushing up prices in 2007 and ’08 were loans to borrowers with No Income, No Jobs, and No Assets. ... Now we only have one kind of NINJA left, and those are students. Student loans have been the most rapidly growing loans in the country. ... The whole student loan scandal is a corrupt. It shows the degree to which the universities and the government loan system have been taken over by banks writing the loans to give themselves a free ride at public expense."

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/25/another-housing-bubb...

Just read the above the other day, and I know it's slightly off-topic, but it meshes nicely with some of the points you made.

I figured out around the last year or so of my university career that I should have actually spent less time in class than I did, but I did eventually figure it out. And I agree wholeheartedly with no one explicitly telling students about all of this. I can't tell you how livid I was once it all clicked. I try to expose the idea to as many high schoolers as I possibly can, but they aren't yet affected so it doesn't exactly make a whole lot of sense to them.

Anyhow, this comparison of student loan / universities working as a new profit center, similar to the junk mortgages of the '08 crash is new to me though. I think it illustrates what's going on very clearly, even if Micheal Hudson is a bit extreme with his view of the schism between public/private.

Jane Jacobs also wrote critically of what Universities had become (credentialing), and how it might (negatively) affect our culture sometime down the line in her book, Dark Age Ahead.