The way I remember it, student loans were not that big of a problem until the federal government took over all of them and banned banks from making these loans. I could be wrong.
They were, but not nearly on the same scale. I worked in the student lending business 20+ years ago, and while the loan amounts were generally much lower, there was still the ongoing problem of people going to crappy degree mills, dropping/flunking out, and discovering only after graduation that their “dream job”, for which they had taken on so much debt, didn’t exist.
I was working my way through college myself at the time...the “horror stories” (or at least very unsettling situations) I was seeing in case files was a major personal eye-opener on the dangers of debt.