Meanwhile, the colleges acted like accessories to a crime. By placing Navient on their preferred lender lists, they were recommending the firm to students who foolishly thought their schools were looking out for their best interests. They weren’t. The colleges wanted to increase their enrollments, even if it meant looking the other way as their students were exploited.

It seems everybody but the student borrower gets a financial advantage from this setup — and that is a disgrace. Instead of investing in college students, this country allows them to become marks for greedy lenders.

The unprecedented student debt load, now at a cumulative $1.4 trillion, slows the ability of graduates to become self-sustaining contributors to the economy at large. College is a gateway to the middle class, and a way to stay in it. But few will have those opportunities if they can’t survive the loan sharks in the waters just off campus.

They’re not getting much help. The federal Department of Education isn’t asking Navient to play fair. Instead, it continues to refer student borrowers to the company. The one federal agency that could help students, the CFPB, is under attack in the Republican-controlled Congress, which is eager to kill it to please the lending industry.

With the federal government shirking its responsibilities, the best hope to get a fair deal from lenders for college students is with Shapiro and his fellow attorneys general in Illinois and Washington, who also are suing Navient. More should follow their lead.