I'm not sure where you missed the part where student loans are not dischargeable debt. http://www.finaid.org/questions/bankruptcyexception.phtml

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The Bankruptcy Amendments and Federal Judgeship Act of 1984 made private student loans from all nonprofit lenders excepted from discharge, not just colleges, by striking the words "of higher education". The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 expanded this to include all "qualified education loans", regardless of whether a nonprofit institution was involved in making the loans.

The only reason the banks HAVE TO charge a higher rate than the government is because they have to borrow their money from the Fed, though these days they're doing so at zero percent, so until the Fed hikes that, there are no real need... except that a government program is usually designed to make zero dollars in profit, and that's contrary to the mission of a bank. So they don't have to charge more, but they're going to, because that's who they are. If there's no profit in it, they're not interested.

The banks are VERY interested because it's a huge profit pool, which they can pretend is without risk, much like they pretended with housing, due to the whole non-dischargeable thing.

Based on the fact that they repeated the S&L crisis less than 20 years later and exponentially bigger in scale, I can't say I'm in any way impressed by the intelligence of banks.