There are plenty of students that have incurred student loan debt, in which, many of these same students struggle in paying back such debt, for a lot of reasons, in which, the primary one is that they do not have the ready means to do so. While it is one thing to be "pinged" to pay back such debt, and another thing to have your wages garnished legally by Federal, State, or child support agencies, it is an entirely different thing for taxpayers to have their Federal refund checks and/or their State refund checks "taken" from them in their entirety for non-payment of delinquent student debt, especially when there is a massive underclass of Americans, that each year, are totally dependent upon receiving those same Federal or State refunds in order to pay bills, to buy things, and just to basically survive.
While the government, likes to demonstrate how reasonable and considerate they are, by providing a step-by-step guide of how students that are unable to pay their loans, can request or negotiate the re-payment of such, there are a substantial amount of people that really don't even bother reading or paying much attention to that information. In addition, despite all the various avenues that students who are falling into default may avail themselves of, a significant amount of those student debtors don't really know how to deal with such, and thereby fail to do anything because they figure whatever that they might attempt to do, won't work out and besides they still don't have the means to pay back such a loan, but alas the chickens do come home to roost, especially so when expected and already designated monies that taxpayers are anticipating from their Federal and/or State authorities is snatched completely from their eagerly awaiting hands.
There isn't any good reason, why tax refunds should be subject to full confiscation in order to pay back whatever loan that a taxpayer has, for the only fair way to deal with outstanding loans, is rather than taking away legitimate refunds away from taxpaying citizens, that instead such agencies need to follow the rules of the road in regards to garnishments, which, by law, are limited to 15% of your disposable income, for defaulted student loans. This means that those that ignore repeated requests to pay back student loans, are subject to suffering a 15% garnishment on their wages, and in aggregate no more than 25% total for all applicable garnishments, which while quite unfortunate, at least puts a limit on garnishments. It would then follow, that tax refunds should also follow the same percentage formula, so that rather than the Federal and/or State agencies having the right to take all of a taxpayer's anticipated refund, the limit should be the same as the garnishment limit which is 15%, and nothing more.
While there are a lot of reasons why student loans are defaulted on, certainly one of the most common reasons, is that the defaulter typically does not have the monetary means to do so, in which, their biggest "paycheck" of the year is usually their tax refund, so that the full taking of such a refund by government agencies, creates undue stress, undue burden, and undue harm, to those that have so little to begin with, so that really the only lesson that is learnt by them, is that this government crushes the little people while protecting and augmenting the favored class.