The Kids Are Middle-Aged

The role of student debt in the arrested development of one American adult among millions.

Photo by Malin K. on Unsplash

Today the Supreme Court ruled that the Biden Administration’s evil plot to forgive student loans is not legal. I’m not here to talk about the decision or the numbers, but here are some facts for scale’s sake (courtesy of Education Data Initiative):

• 43.6 million borrowers have federal student loan debt.
• The outstanding federal loan balance is $1.644 trillion and accounts for 92.6% of all student loan debt.
• The average federal student loan debt balance is $37,717 while the total average balance (including private loan debt) may be as high as $40,505.
• The average public university student borrows $25,969 to attain a bachelor’s degree.

Those are big numbers; too big to mean anything if you don’t have a particular interest in the relevant statistics. But these numbers mean something to me personally. They occupy more than a moment of thought every day of my life since 2015 when I graduated from college.

Why didn’t I think about them before that? One of the leading criticisms of loan forgiveness is that people shouldn’t take on debt if they don’t intend to repay it. “They knew what they signed up for.”