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Who cuts a more forlorn figure than a poor kid who graduates from college facing crippling loan payments during the Great Recession of 2010?

Unlike too many of her peers, that student was prepared for college when she came out of high school. She made it through college despite the financial pressures that kept her friends from finishing or even starting a degree. Now, saddled with crushing debts, she seems as far as ever from the better life we all promised her.

You'd think more people would be willing to give her a hand. Instead, we have a system that encourages debt without doing much to raise the real value of grants to low-income students. What's worse, a growing number of people in the policy world seem to be concluding that college just isn't worth it for poor kids like her.

So What's The Problem with Student Lending? Here's how Arne Duncan describes the current state of student lending:

Every year, taxpayers subsidize student loans to the tune of $9 billion. Banks service these loans, collect the debt, keep the interest, and turn a profit. When borrowers default on their loans, taxpayers foot the bill, and banks still reap the interest.

Duncan and President Obama want to end the subsidies and issue loans directly through the Education Department. The move would save billions of dollars the feds could use for Pell Grants, community colleges and early learning programs. And it could make lower-interest loans available to more students. Of course, this plan doesn't sit well with many student lenders, who can use those subsidies to pay for lobbyists.

Is It Wise to Question the Value of College? The skeptics may have a point. College costs have risen to perverse levels, the return on students' investment seems anything but secure these days, and--you guessed it--rising student debt is cutting into the college earnings premium. It makes much more sense, the argument goes, to steer students who aren't college material into sound career and technical programs that cost less.

I worry, though, that "college material" generally means "rich." In an ideal world, a student's zip code would not determine her choices for study beyond high school. Wealthy kids would decide that technical school is right for them. Poor kids could decide that they would prefer the four-year route. But that's just not the way things work.

In fact, some (but certainly not most) of the college critics stray very close to the belief that demography is destiny. Charles Murray of Bell Curve infamy is a case in point. Some kids--read poor kids and kids of color--just don't have what it takes to go to college, he tells us, so let's clip their wings now rather than later. Over the past few years, I've seen a lot of comments on mainstream blogs that make the same ugly arguments, though without Murray's decorum. (One comment I read just this week declared, elegantly, that "poor families are made of suck.")

Ultimately, the "college isn't for everyone" line of thought can make us all too comfortable with the current education caste system. It can lessen the urgency of improving the schools our poorest children attend. It can distract us from the huge social and economic barriers those children face as they try to gain the same opportunities the wealthiest among us enjoy. And it can make it all the easier to turn a blind eye to a student lending system that burdens the very students who most need our help.

It's true, college may not be for everyone. But until student inclination--and not income--becomes the major sorting mechanism for college, I'm not ready to back away from the "college-ready" mantra.