For some borrowers, those third-party actors can hound them for payments, or encourage former students with too much debt to enter into deferment or forbearance. Those are sometimes short-term solutions that can prevent default, but don’t improve the long-term solvency of the debt.

“The Education Department is one of the largest financial institutions in the country. If it were a bank, it would rank fifth in the U.S. in assets,” Janet Lorin wrote for Bloomberg.

As college has become a middle-class entitlement, federal student loans have ballooned. At around $10 billion in 1990, by 2014, the federal government doled out about $95 billion in loans, and about $100 billion annually since the 2009-2010 academic year.

With so much money floating around, proposed solutions to lowering the cost of higher education abound. Hillary Clinton, for one, has made the case for student loan reform by saying that the federal government “shouldn’t be making a profit off of lending to young people.” The alleged profit that the government sees, however, isn’t so clear.

The real profit is in taking advantage of cheap federal loans, or gaining federal contracts to service the student debt. Bloomberg noted that the Education Department paid of $576 million in fees last year to debt-servicing companies to collect on debt. The money is there, but crafting higher education reform that limits how much contractors can make from that debt, without limiting federal involvement or the availability of funds for higher education, is a daunting — if not impossible — task.