You should owe the money to the school. Will align incentives. If graduates don’t make enough to pay back the debt then the school could become insolvent. As it should.
You should just owe money to banks -- and banks should be allowed to fail.
Right now, the only people on the hook are the taxpayers who bail the banks out.
Universities, with their huge endowments and large staffs to manage investments, have already become financial institutions.
Let schools act as creditors or not, depending on their business model. What's important is that government shouldn't be acting as a misaligned lending institution.
It also ensures SS is contributed toward because the longer there are pauses in the contribution of SS the harder it is to establish a sustainable in system. The rich folk have always been trying to remove the SS system because they don't want to pay more taxes. We pay taxes to support the infrastructure that can keep wealthy comfortable. Reason things cost so much was because of greed and a lack of common sense dressed up as sympathy. Certainly makes the number climb in terms of profits but if the profit's value is dilluted then do the numbers really mean anything?
Also, if we talk purely about research, shouldn't that actually be a trained job? Trained things would be far away from your average factory job, but are still trained so graduate students can do their job.
I think that's the point, jobs and their required skills change rapidly and university should be providing something higher-level than just training for a job. A degree should provide you with the necessary skills to teach yourself whatever you'll need to during your career.
And if the university thinks underwater basket weaving is really important and should definitely be studied, they should fund it themselves, not the taxpayer, to align incentives. "It's important if I don't have to pay for it" gives me some information.