It seems that a lot of high school seniors contemplating college are too naive about borrowing and repaying a loan to tell whether a given loan choice is rational or irrational. Or so we are being told.
I would think that the prospect of taking out a major loan, and one from which there is no bankruptcy protection, would be an ideal situation to make a subject like compound interest into a study of real life, practical math.
The goal would be two-fold. First, there's an immediate goal of producing millions of college applicants who are capable of "doing the math" when they are offered a loan and need to decide whether to sign or not to sign.
The second goal is to expose them to some math that goes beyond simple linear proportion problems that they have been dealing with for several years in grade school, and to motivate the lesson with a real-life application.