Over the last couple of decades, we have been engaged in an enormous national experiment, taking impressionable and often ignorant teenagers and young adults and seeing just how much student loan debt they can handle.

Colleges and graduate schools flaunt their fancy amenities while making the case for their brand of degrees, loan papers in hand. Parents stand idly by and often co-sign for the debt. As a result, more than $1 trillion in student loans is outstanding, and people of all ages are struggling to repay them.

Whatever you may think of these results and the costs that produced them, there is also a practical question at hand for people who feel as if they are in over their heads: Is it ever a good idea to try to beat the system by openly defying it and refusing to repay the debt that you willingly took on?

This is the course of action taken by Lee Siegel, whose opinion article last Sunday for The New York Times’s Sunday Review section was the most-read piece on the website at one point. Refusing to pay can work under certain circumstances. On Monday, after former students of the now-defunct Corinthian Colleges refused to pay loan debts, the Education Department took the highly unusual step of forgiving their loans.