THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

The profitability of the US government lies upon your shoulders. No, not taxes, but the interest (some say vigorish) of your student loans. You, our sweet children, are a major federal profit center.

Roshan Bliss owes nearly $80,000 for a degree he never received. A Master’s degree candidate at the University of Denver, he dropped out two-thirds of the way through.

“I already owed more than $70,000 in student loans,” he told MintPress News. “I did the math and figured out I would still have to take out another $30,000 for tuition and more for living expenses. It just wasn’t worth it.”

The interest rate for his loans is set at 6.8 percent and that goes directly to the federal government, which has administered student loans since 2010. Some — including Bliss — accuse the government of taking in billions of dollars in “profit” from students who much go into debt to finance their education.

In fiscal year 2013, the federal government cleared $41.3 billion in profit from its student loans. If the government were a private lender, it would be the third most profitable company in the world behind Exxon Mobil and Apple.

Bliss had managed to keep his loans in check during his undergraduate experience at Purdue University. He had received a full-tuition scholarship and worked part-time for the full four years to pay most of his other expenses. Yet he still graduated with $13,000 in debt.

That was in 2009, just a year into the Great Recession. Recent graduates like Bliss were entering a workforce without jobs for them.

“Everyone always told me study what you love and you’ll never work another day in your life,” Bliss said. However, “Starting my career at the height of job loss in the economy, no one was saying, ‘Wow, we really need someone with a philosophy degree.’”

Without work, he heeded advice to go to graduate school and wait out the recession. By the time he finished, the logic went, there would be more jobs. Getting a partial scholarship to University of Denver, he “saw all these zeroes” and came to the conclusion “I can’t afford not to go.”

So Bliss decided that he would get actual job skills and started a program in conflict negotiation. “I’m a trained mediator now,” he said with a mix of pride and pessimism.

It soon became clear he probably wouldn’t find a job, even with the new degree, so he dropped out to cut his losses and now blogs part-time and works as an organizer who advocates for eliminating college debt. His income is so low that he isn’t required to pay any of his loans back yet. In the meantime, however, the interest on his loans will continue to accrue — that’s already added several thousand dollars to what owes to the U.S. federal government since quitting the program.

Bliss is far from alone. He’s among around 40 million other Americans who have $1 trillion in unpaid aggregate student debt. The average student debt holder owes about $30,000.

And the federal government profits doubled this year thanks to the filibuster of the Republicans of Elizabeth Warren's bill to reduce the interest rate to the Fed Funds rate. Or to put it another way, the cost of money to the federal government.