Behold the American higher education system: a $1.8 trillion monument to human gullibility and institutional greed, currently masquerading as a ‘nightmare’ that someone, somewhere, actually intends to wake us from. For decades, we have watched as the university-industrial complex transformed from a pursuit of knowledge into a high-stakes debt-origination mill, churning out degrees with the utility of a chocolate teapot while shackling a generation to a financial corpse. Now, we are told to choose between two flavors of incompetence to ‘fix’ it. On one side, we have the Biden administration’s legacy of performative flailing; on the other, the looming specter of a ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ from a man who treats policy like a late-night infomercial for gold-plated steaks.

Let’s start with the current debris. The Biden administration’s approach to the student-debt crisis was a masterclass in the neoliberal art of the ‘Middle Ground’—a place where dreams go to die under the weight of judicial review and administrative paperwork. They promised the moon, delivered a handful of moon-dust, and then acted surprised when the Supreme Court informed them that they weren't, in fact, absolute monarchs. It was a strategy of hope-peddling, designed to keep the base energized while doing precisely nothing to lower the cost of a three-credit course in ‘Post-Structuralist Interpretations of Sitcoms.’ Biden’s team added to the pile by tweaking interest rates and offering forgiveness programs that required a PhD in Bureaucratic Masochism to navigate, all while the underlying rot—the runaway cost of tuition—continued to fester like an untreated gangrenous limb.

But fear not, because the alternative has arrived with all the subtlety of a brass band in a library. Enter the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill,’ the Trumpian answer to a crisis that requires a scalpel but is being offered a sledgehammer wrapped in tinsel. The proposal, we are told, will finally hold universities accountable. It’s an adorable sentiment, isn't it? The idea that the same political class that has spent half a century subsidizing this bubble will suddenly grow a conscience. The plan reportedly involves pressuring colleges to use their massive, tax-exempt endowments to lower costs, or forcing them to have ‘skin in the game’ when their graduates inevitably default. It sounds logical if you’ve recently suffered a traumatic head injury and forgotten how power works in America.

In reality, the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ is likely just another rebranding exercise. We are moving from a system that bankrupts you with a smile and a ‘diversity and inclusion’ seminar to a system that will bankrupt you while shouting about ‘merit’ and ‘patriotism.’ Neither side is interested in the actual solution, which would involve dismantling the administrative bloat that has turned every mid-tier state college into a sprawling resort with a lazy river and a vice-president for every letter of the alphabet. No, the grift must continue. The universities need the debt to fund their vanity projects; the government needs the debt to keep the populace on a leash; and the politicians need the debt so they can keep promising to ‘solve’ it every four years in exchange for your vote.

The ‘nightmare’ isn’t that the debt exists; the nightmare is the realization that the entire edifice of American meritocracy is built on a subprime loan. We have convinced twenty-two-year-olds that their only hope for survival is to sign away thirty years of their labor for a credential that is being rapidly devalued by AI and a shrinking labor market. And now, we are supposed to celebrate because the Orange King wants to slap his name on the bankruptcy papers? It’s a farce. Whether the relief comes in the form of a convoluted Biden-era spreadsheet or a ‘beautiful’ Trumpian decree, the result is the same: the taxpayer eats the loss, the universities keep the cash, and the students remain the useful idiots in a game they were never meant to win.

We are witnessing the final stages of a classic American hustle. One side offers a slow death by a thousand bureaucratic cuts; the other offers a spectacular explosion followed by a press release claiming victory. Both are equally contemptuous of the people they claim to help. The $1.8 trillion will never be repaid because it can’t be; it’s a fictional number in a fictional economy. So, by all means, let’s look forward to the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill.’ It will be the perfect tombstone for a country that decided it was more profitable to sell its children into debt-peonage than to actually teach them how to think. It won't end the nightmare; it will just give the monsters a fresh coat of paint.