Instead, they left the ‘forgotten generation’ with a mountain of debt and regret; ‘I’m going to be working until the day I die.’
The six million-plus borrowers aged 50 to 61 have the highest average balance of any age group, at $47,857, according to Federal Student Aid data. Now, as parents and grandparents, they are passing along a skepticism toward higher education and its hefty price tag, part of the broader unraveling of America’s “college for all” ideology.
The oldest Gen Xers were born in 1965, the same year the Higher Education Act created the modern student-loan system. The baby boomers older than them didn’t have the same access, and the millennials younger than them had greater awareness of the long shadow debt can cast. But for a brief window when the “forgotten generation” was reaching college age, student loans conveyed all of the promise of American upward mobility with none of the pitfalls.