Banks in general have always made the most of their profit by interest on lending. Before the crisis, they started giving mortgages to everyone and their mother without any due diligence.... then the defaults came so instead of profit for every mortgage they got loses. Now they are way more careful on lending money, which basically means they are not "selling" their main product. The future looks dark for them.
I remember the time (before the nineties) when if someone wanted a home he had to pay upfront a good amount to the builder, and then go on paying monthly way before the house was even finished building. No mortages bullshit. Banks were not such a big deal. HOusing prices were low as shit.
All the fucking problem of the last decades has been because of lending money to the plebs. That made them think they were "rich" when they weren't. And banks "banked" like bandits on that stupid feeling.
If you borrow money because you don't have it, then you will always stay poor. Only borrow money when you are leveraging for a biggest (safe) return. If you are poor you should be saving instead of borrowing.
People that really "needs" the money, should never, ever borrow the money.
Enough rant.... I am open for criticism.
When I was a student I invested large parts of my student loan, but my professional path has been more or less laid out thanks to long planning (knew before 18 that I wanted to be able to retire around 30-40) so I knew in what proportion I could put loans at stake without destroying myself in any worst case scenario. I made sure to have exceptional grades in a highly sought after field though, so the probability of me failing along the way were virtually negligible and the cost of default was zero (e.g. no job = exemption from repaying the loan without any downsides on my part). In that situation not taking the risk and potentially fixing an error of judgement down the path would've been irrational.I remember the time (before the nineties) when if someone wanted a home he had to pay upfront a good amount to the builder, and then go on paying monthly way before the house was even finished building. No mortages bullshit. Banks were not such a big deal. HOusing prices were low as shit.
All the fucking problem of the last decades has been because of lending money to the plebs. That made them think they were "rich" when they weren't. And banks "banked" like bandits on that stupid feeling.
If you borrow money because you don't have it, then you will always stay poor. Only borrow money when you are leveraging for a biggest (safe) return. If you are poor you should be saving instead of borrowing.
People that really "needs" the money, should never, ever borrow the money.
Enough rant.... I am open for criticism.
I've seen other plebs do the same (with non-student loans) from a much worse starting position implode though, so you're certainly right. Most people don't know how to manage risk and just go a path of blind faith and there are tons of predatory types just waiting to prey on them.
Either way, the banks are just filling a niche. The real problem are all the idiots who are waiting for the stars to magically align instead of taking their life into their own hands. And the absolute worst are the very same idiots who channel their energy into nagging governments to bend them backwards by legalizing a billion fucking pronouns for idiots who can't just be honest and say that they either always or sometimes prefer dick. Like a bunch of toddlers telling on their siblings instead of learning how not to be a helpless retard.
I did a similar thing regarding investing some of my student loans.
In fact, I have made such attempts all of my life, since graduating from highschool and not having much of a salary. I pretty much took at least 10% of my post highschool income and I made investments with it. Some of them were not the best of investments (especially because my inclination has always been relatively low rish because i wanted to have a certain confidence that my return was going to be greater than my borrowing costs), but the practice has always been kinds of dollar cost averaging attempts.
I did not go to college right after high school, but instead started college several years after finishing high school, but I considered the student loan money to be interest free ability to attempt to get returns on "free money" and to build up my nest egg of investment money.. continuing little by little.. and really taking a large number of years to accomplish such building up of decent amounts.
I'm actually surprised that investing parts of student loans (where plausible) isn't the norm. You're usually going to spend the money anyways, if not on investments then on booze or whatever floats your boat.
Not sure how sensible that would be in the US, as I've seen some outrageous interest rates and conditions over there. But given the amount of states and their own individual fuckery there could well be some reasonable student loans that basically beg for arbitrage.
Of course, the rules for student loans, including eligibility and interest rates vary with time, but generally speaking there is a certain level of publicly subsidized loans that do not bear interest until after graduating or other qualifying conditions. So the public student loans are usually preferred to private loans, yet surely, anyone who wants to take this approach needs to assess his/her own situation including how spending the loans and not necessarily using the loans to buy unnecessary consumption goods... and also, there is a certain need to be able to get a job after school to pay back the loans because you would not count on the loan proceeds to earn greater than some of the amounts that was used for necessary living/school expenses. In other words, you still have to attempt to invest wisely, and I think that overally my proceeds from the portion of my student loan investments was merely in 4% to 6% arena, overall, but it still seemed decent, especially getting 0% interest for a decent period of time, which I believe for me was nearly 10 years before I started making payments and continued to receive 0% interest (at least on the first loans the later ones only had a few years of 0%).
Of course, I did not have anything like BTC available during that time, so I am not sure how I would approach BTC based on my then perspective, but likely I would have learned a lot faster because bitcoin allows for way more interaction than the kinds of investments that I was making during my student loan time.
"BOB knows what his doing, and guess he just throws in a joke from time to time...." 
