The average student who borrowed money for their bachelor’s degree has just over $35,000 in debt. What is perhaps most alarming about this number is how much and how quickly this number is rising. Just from 2014, the number rose almost $2,000 and from ten years ago, the number is roughly $15,000 higher.
The rising cost of colleges, and thus loans, has been decried as a national outrage. U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has been so far unsuccessfully working on a bill to lower interest rates on federal student loans, declared the student debt problem “an economic emergency…Forty million people are dealing with $1.2 trillion in outstanding student debt. It’s stopping young people from buying homes, from buying cars and from starting small businesses.”