If you’re a recent college grad with a ton of student debt, this one’s for you. If you’re the parent of such a child, this one is also for you.

Because it’s time to ask why this is the only country in the world where we permit our children to be saddled with tens — sometimes hundreds — of thousands of dollars of debt before they begin to earn a penny.

At some point most countries realized that it pays to encourage smart kids to go to college. That led inevitably to government-backed student loans. The problem, however, was that colleges used the loan guarantee to run up the cost of tuition.

Were it $1,000 or $10,000, it would look pretty much the same to the student, if he got a loan to carry it. In other countries, therefore, the government loan guarantee came in the form of a bargain with the colleges: The students can get the loans, provided the colleges cap their tuition.

Sensible, right? Only that’s not what we did. We allowed the colleges to run up the tab and populate the campus with idiotic courses and administrative bloat.

In 1976, tuition and fees at private colleges were $10,000 in 2016 dollars. Now they’re $33,000. For public colleges there was a fourfold increase, from $2,500 to $10,000.

Back then we didn’t have safe spaces and we didn’t censor free speech. We didn’t have courses like “The Sociology of Miley Cyrus” (Skidmore) or “Beginning Dungeons and Dragons” (Oberlin). We couldn’t afford them.

Students today emerge from college ill-educated by comparison. We’ve trained too many of them to be unemployable, and we’ve given them a jobless economy. What’s worse, they come out of college as debt slaves, where everything they earn goes to pay off their debt. At that point, they’ll have to ask themselves: Why bother? It’s like a 100 percent marginal-income tax, which pretty much saps any incentive to go out and earn.

That’s why I’m sympathetic to the more extreme forms of millennial protest. Mostly their demands are nonsensical, but their grievances are real. Right now many of them can’t even keep up with the interest on the loan. They’re the victims of a generational betrayal, where we Baby Boomers paid low tuition and then as college teachers taught them courses that unfitted them for work.

In other countries, students come out of college with minimal amounts of student debt. They get a fresh start in life. That’s what’s needed here.

What relief we offer our debt slaves is chintzy. We have a bankruptcy forgiveness plan, but it’s so convoluted and hamstrung that few graduates avail themselves of it. We also give students who go into public-service jobs a break in the form of debt forgiveness, if they keep up their payments for 10 years.

That’s drawn students into public-service jobs, but now there’s a threat that the program will be zeroed out. That’s a fine example of bait-and-switch, for people who went into public service precisely to take advantage of the plan.

The answer is blindingly simply. Let everyone qualify for the debt-relief program, whether their jobs are in the public or private sector. Or even offer them a fresh start with the right to discharge their debts in bankruptcy, a right students had until the 1970s.

Somewhere along the line we realized that bankrupts are not moral scofflaws. We realized that debtor’s prisons made no sense, and that debt slavery is its second cousin. The prison prevented anyone from earning, and debt slavery takes away the incentive to earn.

The student-debt-load crisis traps graduates in an economic dead end that makes us more of a class society. It’s not a problem for the richest of Americans, who can easily pay off the loans, but it can be a crippling burden for everyone else.

And if we allow a bankruptcy discharge for students, I’d add one more little reform. Let the burden of the discharge fall upon the college that taught them, so that they bear the cost of the courses that unfit their graduates for employment.

Let the colleges bear the cost of courses on Miley Cyrus.

F.H. Buckley teaches at Scalia Law School. His most recent book was “The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America.”