Depending on your perspective, it captured either capitalist alienation, or the disillusion that followed the collapse of the student protests at Tiananmen Square.
Economists do not predict a collapse of the student loan system, which would, in essence, mean wholesale default.
"We've been getting calls for several years now, beginning with the collapse of Corinthian, from student veterans whose lives were put on hold," Will Hubbard, vice president of government affairs for the nonprofit, told the Army Times.
With the crucial support of Family First senator Steven Fielding, the Howard government outlawed the collection of money to fund student organisations by the universities, leading to the financial collapse of the traditional structures for student activism – the student representative councils and university clubs and societies.
At 72, having outgrown the smut-minded confines of the pink film, he has made his most ambitious work, "United Red Army," a 190-minute chronicle of the tumultuous rise and self-destructive collapse of the Japanese militant student groups of the 1960s and '70s.
But while the waves of protests and arrests -- the latest came last week outside a Tehran university -- may indicate the inevitable collapse of the Islamic Republic, what student leaders are calling for in Iran does not correspond with the administration's designs for the region.
In the March 2008 earthquake in Sichuan province, shoddy school construction resulted in the collapse of several schools full of students.
Just 20 miles north, the collapse of Beichuan Middle School buried 1,000 students and teachers.
The audience for classical music was also collapsing as generations of students left school knowing nothing of the work of masters such as Mozart and Beethoven, composers of some of "the greatest achievements of mankind".
Although Ai had been a long-term critic of the authorities, his own problems escalated with the Sichuan earthquake of 2008 during which innumerable schools collapsed, killing thousands of students.
