Here’s what I don’t understand about the student debt crisis: Why did parents let this happen?

I mean, would any parent ask their child about the car they’d like to drive? A Lamborghini! Sure, it’s yours.

Or, has any parent ever asked their child’s opinion — I mean really sought it out — about the kind of home they’d like to live in?

“Johnny, would you like to live in that big house over there or this little one that we can afford?”

“The big one!” OK, you got it.

Of course, that never happens. So why do the adults start the conversation about college with the question: Where would you like to go to school?

I understand that college is an investment. And I’m all in favor of higher education. I’m just not in favor of overpriced higher education.

College can be a huge expense — bigger than an expensive car or the down payment on a house — as millions of students find out when they graduate with a debt load that takes years or maybe even decades to repay in professions that don’t pay very much and probably never will.

Student debt, as you probably heard, has become an issue in the presidential campaign because Democratic candidates are trying to garner votes by proposing that the US government somehow forgive the loans.

That ignores the fact that much of the $1.56 trillion in student debt is owed to private sources. And it also skirts the fact that most of the student loans are securitized, which means that investors bought them and they’d have to be paid off by Washington to cancel the loans.

I’m not sure what candidate Bernie Sanders and the other proponents of debt cancellation are thinking, because for every voter who’d be happy with student debt forgiveness there will probably be two voters who are pissed because they either took out a loan and repaid it diligently or didn’t go to the college of their choice because they didn’t want the indebtedness.

But those aren’t the issues I want to bring up today. The only issue is: Why?

Why are parents — who presumably have some experience with money or at least have experience not having enough — allowing their kids to start life in a deep financial hole?

Here are some numbers to reflect on.

According to Lending Tree and Student Loan Hero, students in Washington, DC, on average, during the 2016-17 school year took out $17,770 a year in federal debt. That doesn’t include private loans.

In California, they borrow $13,823 a year; Maryland $13,161 and New York $12,950.

I don’t want to look like a know-it-all because I went to colleges that today would be beyond my means without loans. But my three kids not only didn’t have college loans but they finished their undergraduate degrees in the black, and I’m not talking about the color of their caps and gowns.

How’d they do it? They, in consultation with me and my wife, made affordable choices. And now they aren’t broke.

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