Imagine this scenario: You decide to co-sign a $50,000 loan for your daughter’s law school tuition.

When your daughter graduates and passes the bar, she makes the first few payments to Sallie Mae-the lender – who insists after six months your daughter never made the payments. They hum and haw, even when you show them the canceled checks.

As you’re trying to sort this out, you find out your credit has been destroyed, as has your daughter’s. And because of this, no law firm will hire her.

Finally, as a last resort, you decide to take out the money your daughter owes from your retirement savings and work out arrangements with your daughter later. When the money is sent to Sallie Mae, things go horribly wrong again. The money gets misappropriated, which results in late fees and additional interest.

By now, things are such a terrible mess that you fear nothing will resolve it. But the story ends happily because your husband is an attorney and he sends a slew of letters to Sallie Mae demanding that your credit be restored and that the matter be resolved.

This is a true story, one of thousands of horror stories swirling around within the student loan industry. It is one of the most telling examples of a changed country, and one that is happy to fleece its young adults and have them indoctrinated into the tainted system of American debt before they’re old enough to drink.

There is an ocean of tears being cried over this crisis – stories of dried up dreams, unemployment, divorces and suicides.

Meanwhile, back in Dodge, the federal government is earning an estimated $66 billion in profits from student loans that originated from 2007-12. It’s a cash cow, folks. And think about this: Some projections estimate that the government will pocket an additional $185 billion in profits on new student loans made over the next 10 years – all on the backs of a very vulnerable segment of our population.

This, as Sen. Elizabeth Warren has said, is obscene. She’s taken this crisis personally and has been a champion for change. And she’s right. Instead of investing in our country and the future of our children, the government is profiting from these practices.

Any pretense about our kids being “trophy kids” or that they shouldn’t have taken out a loan if they couldn’t afford to pay it back is completely unfair. We’ve sold them this dream about America and the importance of education and achievement, but what we couldn’t have predicted is that college tuition rates would go up four times faster than the consumer price index and increase 1,120 percent over 25 years.

And we have to take into consideration the sad state of our economy, or the fact that college graduates are having a hard time finding jobs-or at least jobs that pay. I have read story after story about how a $20,000 student loan easily became a $100,000 student loan because of loan deferment, default or only making payments on the interest.

“Right now,” one graduate wrote to a student loan crisis website, “I pay over $2,000 a month in loans alone and last year $10,000 went towards the interest on those loans. I have no car, no home, no investments and no savings.”

Some of you may not have sympathy for these folks, but then, you need to dig a little deeper. When most of the baby boomers graduated from college, it was unheard of for anyone to be paying back $2,000 a month in loans. The world was a different place then.

And you have to conjure up some sympathy based on this fact alone: part of the rising cost of tuition is due to the sheer availability of student loans. In effect, the colleges are saying, “Oh, there’s all kinds of money out there! Let’s raise tuition.” As a consequence, it’s not all that unusual to run into one of your children’s friends who is more than $100,000 in debt at the ripe old age of 24 or 25. And word is it will take the average student two decades to pay off these loans, and a lifetime for others with larger debt, like medical students.

I don’t see things changing in the near future, so the real question is how families can avoid this debt trap? Parents really need to explore options with their children, including state schools, community colleges and trade schools.

But for those wading through these difficult waters, there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight.

Here’s a story to drive it home: “In just a few months I’m going to turn 62 years old,” says William, who took out $44,000 in student loans more than two decades ago. “I’ve been attempting to pay back my student loan debt for 22 years … I’ve worked four jobs to try to pay back the debt.”

William still has nearly $130,000 to go. That’s right. He borrowed $44,000, has paid back $31,000 and still has more than $100,000 to gothanks to the interest and the terms set by these government-sponsored draconian lenders.

I’m sure he doesn’t anticipate living long enough to write that last check.

The problem here is that you’re operating under the assumption that we still live in the Old America, when profit wasn’t worshipped like a god and student loans were meant to help our young adults get through college.