It's open for interpretation, true. But when the interviewer asks the mother about her decision making and the mother says she feels guilty for having been naive, the daughter then says it's not her mother's fault. Which I interpret as an admission that then the blame, or a part of it anyway, is hers, but I can see how you'd interpret it differently. It's hard to say with the article just containing that one direct quote from the daughter.

Er, I hate to break it to you, but I didn't take anything "out of context", and those other quotes weren't ambiguous. If an article states that someone makes a borrowing decision "based more on emotion than reason", you'd have to twist it a lot indeed to deny that the article criticizes that person. Same with the "blind faith". I can see why you'd think this article places too much blame on the university and the banks and too little on the students, but you're simply wrong when you say that no blame is placed on this girl and her mother at all.

I made that remark because of the title of your post, suggesting that you blame the NYT for it. I'd say the distinction between a column and a regular article is fairly essential when you're assigning blame for a stupid article - in the case of a regular article, the newspaper has to carry at least a good part of the blame, whereas with a column, that's not really the case.