Originally Posted by Bostonian
The debt numbers for most college students don't look bad to me:
http://www.asa.org/policy/resources/stats/

[quote]
•As of Quarter 1 in 2012, the average student loan balance for all age groups is $24,301. About one-quarter of borrowers owe more than $28,000; 10% of borrowers owe more than $54,000; 3% owe more than $100,000; and less than 1%, or 167,000 people, owe more than $200,000.

Personally, I find the numbers on that page to be very bad.

For example, the numbers you quoted are an average for ALL age groups. According to that same site, the 30-39 age group has $307 billion in student loans, and the under 30s have $292 billion. So that's 60% of a one-trillion-dollar debt being carried by people under 40. And remember that some of these loans balloon because people can't even afford to pay the interest each month.

And the implication is that more than 25% of the under 40s have more than your $28K in debt.

Sounds pretty scary to me.

Originally Posted by Bostonian's link
As of October 2012, the average amount of student loan debt for the Class of 2011 was $26,600, a 5 percent increase from approximately $25,350 in 2010.

I wonder how much that number went up for members of the class of 2013.

The site also says that 14% of all borrowers are behind on at least one loan (that's 5.4 million people).

It also says that ~37% of federal borrowers between 2004 and 2009 managed to make timely payments without postponing payments or becoming delinquent. How many of that 37% were living on the edge but managing to make payments? How many had to choose between something important (high quality food, turning the heat on, etc.) and making a loan payment? How many had private loans that they couldn't keep up with?

Again, sounds pretty scary to me.

All in all, these numbers (and there are more on that page) sound big enough to have a serious effect on the economy.