I'd go back to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, but I'm nitpicking. It's simple but not easy. That legislation created a myriad of cottage industries and and make money at the expense of the taxpayer and students. (In fact, government programs intended to "help" almost always lead to far more rent seeking than actual help for anyone.) Any attempt to repeal those acts will be met with massive resistance from those that have made hundreds of billions of dollars
But I'm OK with forgiveness if and only if this type of reform was done, because the government actively created this problem. It started by making college prep the default track for public education. That meant that most people graduate with no marketable skills, and they're told by people they're supposed to be able to trust that they "need" college and that it's the ticket to success. The colleges are there to take advantage, and the government is there with tons of "free" money in the form of loans to distort and artificially enable the market price. Should the students be taking out that much in loans? No, but the racket is in place long before they took out a penny of loan money. If a private entity did something similar, it would get sued into bankruptcy.
But this is a bit of an "if my grandmother had balls, she'd be my grandmother" discussion, because nobody's going to repeal those awful laws or do any meaningful reform. And forgiving debt without doing so would be insane. It would make matters much worse, because universities would know they could just jack tuition up even more and wait for the next bailout.