Is student educational debt the next financial crisis?

In the next few months outstanding student educational debt in the US will hit one trillion dollars (it’s already bigger than outstanding credit card debt). Apparently, until the federal government stopped guaranteeing future private educational loans in the summer of 2010 (all federal student loans are now directly from the government, although private banks still collect a fee for servicing them), private federally guaranteed educational loans were being used to securitize various financial instruments structured around the pleasant proposition that private banks could engage in “risk-free” arbitrage by issuing unsecured loans at high interest that were guaranteed against default by the US government.

Somehow that all sounds vaguely familiar . . .