I think the basic disconnect you're running into here is that for many people the government-backed educational loan establishment is not "someone" worthy of any moral consideration, but rather just a poorly-constructed piece of political machinery that only exists because of the failings of the government in regards to public education.
There's another disconnect here: you're treating contracts as a moral imperative, rather than as a civil agreement with failure clauses to be rationally considered. The government does the latter; why should an individual who makes a contract with the government treat it differently?
