Last month, the Supreme Court correctly struck down the Biden administration’s politically expedient attempt to forgive up to $20,000 of student loans for 40 million borrowers. The administration has pushed forward with other proposals, including modifying existing forgiveness programs and going after the leaders of for-profit schools personally. But these haphazard efforts fail to fix the structural problems within our system.

The major hurdle with any type of significant student loan forgiveness effort is the extreme cost to the taxpayer. In order to raise funds for Obamacare, student loan lending was effectively shifted from private lenders to the federal government, eliminating any type of risk rating or checks on rising tuition and allowing the amount of outstanding student loan debt to soar.

By being the primary lender for a trillion-dollar industry, the government expected to bring in substantial revenue to offset the Obamacare costs. As such, whenever the government seeks to forgive large swaths of student loans, that revenue will disappear. The Biden plan struck down by the Supreme Court would have cost nearly $430 billion.

Hiding in plain sight, however, is a bipartisan proposal that provides measured relief to those who really need it and allows the government to recover some of their lost revenue by forcing universities to finally put some skin in the game. The FRESH START Through Bankruptcy Act was introduced last Congress by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a long-standing advocate for student loan relief, and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX).

The bill would remove the requirement in bankruptcy to prove "undue hardship" in order to discharge student loans after a 10-year waiting period, giving those who have genuinely been unable to repay their student loans an opportunity to discharge them in bankruptcy. This is a sensible reversion back to the days when the federal government was not the primary lender and student loans were more easily forgiven. The Biden Justice Department has already started to move in this direction, presuming that undue hardship is met after 10 years. This legislation would ensure consistency across future administrations.

More importantly, though, the bill finally seeks to remind schools of their obligation to look out for their students and not to saddle them with unbearable debt. For schools with consistently high student loan default and low repayment rates at the time of a student’s attendance, the bill empowers the Department of Education to claw back a portion of any loans forgiven in bankruptcy. The provision only applies to colleges with more than one-third of their students receiving federal student loans. This means universities would finally be forced to rethink exorbitant tuition costs.

Let’s be clear: This is not a complete solution. The free-flowing spigot of government loans is fully on, and many schools will be able to avoid the clawback provisions. While unlikely in this political environment, returning student loans to the private sector is the bigger fix needed and would reintroduce important market dynamics, forcing schools to offer and price an education in line with a graduate's employment prospects and the ability to pay back their loans. In this scenario, the federal government could offer grants for those deserving students who, for whatever reason, may be ineligible for private loans.

The legislation does, however, offer a sensible opportunity to provide relief to those who really need it and imposes a new incentive system for schools that could be further fine-tuned and expanded. The Biden administration should support this constitutionally sound step in the right direction.

Ryan Dattilo is a partner with the Aquia Group and the former chief bankruptcy counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee under Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC).