One of the core elements of the 2008 meltdown was when someone abandoned a house, all the other houses in the neighborhood would see a substantial drop in their value. This made it more likely that other people would go underwater on their mortgage and also walk away.
Education doesn’t have this kind of contagion. If you stop paying your student loans it has very little impact on the value on my education.
It's never been more true that education is overpriced and underdelivers.
The contagion may not be "house goes bust and my house value goes down"... but there is a contagion: My degree is now no better than the degrees for the mills pumping out idiots while lowering standards and full of soft degrees filling the markets with "educated" people that aren't qualified to fill a coffee cup at starbucks.
If you don't see a market flooded with lower value results as devaluing the worth of higher education then you're not looking closely enough.
It doesn't need to be contagious to create a crisis, just correlated, e.g. if there is a big macroeconomic shock that makes many students unable to pay their loans all at once.
Education doesn’t have this kind of contagion. If you stop paying your student loans it has very little impact on the value on my education.