Twenty-five years ago, students across the country were encouraged to take out student loans in order to attend college, the cost of which had increased dramatically since the 1970s. It was played as an investment: You could safely borrow tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars because a college degree was a path to a good-paying job, so you’d have no trouble paying back the loans you took out for education.
But even college graduates with salaried jobs struggled to pay back loans. Wages stayed depressed and the cost of housing, food, and child care increased, forcing many college graduates with loans to stretch their budgets further than previous generations. Student debt, however, ballooned. At the end 2024, more than 43 million borrowers owed a combined $1.6 trillion.
There have been many suggestions on how to handle the student debt crisis — and it appears the Trump administration has settled on making it even harder to go at all.