A lesson too late

Bad Credit...it's something they don't teach very well in school, but it's something that many of us will unfortunately encounter. The rules are simple, it's the penalties that are the real complication. Through use of credit, you buy now and pay later. It sounds fantastic, even to little Stephanie Tanner on Full House.
But no one ever went into depth the importance of keeping a good credit score, or even what a credit score was. Had someone in high school told me, aside from college and career, keep your credit rating high, strive for that 720, I would have protected myself much better. I wish more adults had warned me back in the day instead of ignoring the obvious elephant in everyone's living room.
Keep a good credit rating, and you can accomplish that dream of owning a house, or a car, or getting affordable insurance and most of all, never have to hear from a debt collector from NCO or any other cannibalistic debt collector.
And now, jobs and companies, when hiring, are running credit checks. Which, I guess on their side, is somewhat understandable. But to me, here is what I don't quite get.
It's easy to run into bad credit. Take out a Sallie Mae student loan and find out just how easy it is to get into bad credit. But not all people who have bad credit are slackers. They're not all deadbeats, skipping the bills left and right. Many are good honest people who just made bad decisions in life. Now, with companies doing credit checks, the hopes of many who want to slowly crawl out of the pit of bad debt, are being buried under more dirt.
How wrong is that? People want to work off their debt anyway they can, and now, are being denied the one possible job that could get them there.
Or are the companies allied with whoever runs this bad credit scam, keeping millions in debt and jacking up the penalty fees? Seriously, does bad credit help this economy? Or are Sallie Mae, NCO and Visa going to tap dance their fat asses about as the United States of America becomes another Argentina?