Student Loans Are Scamming Your Entire Generation

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Here's a number that should make you angry: $268,000.

That's how much one borrower now owes after taking out $60,000 in student loans. She's been paying for years. She owes more than when she started.

This isn't a bug in the system. It's the system working exactly as designed.

And if you're under 30, it's coming for you next.

Americans currently owe $1.8 trillion in student loans. That's trillion with a T. If you divided that money equally among every person in the country, everyone would get $5,400.

The average student borrows over $30,000 for a bachelor's degree. It takes nearly 20 years to pay it off.Since 2006, student debt has increased by 260%.And here's the kicker that nobody talks about: for the first time in 45 years, college graduates have a higher unemployment rate than the national average.

Read that again.You're taking on more debt than any generation before you. You're entering the worst job market for graduates in half a century. And you're being told this is the path to success. Something is deeply broken.

College wasn't always this expensive.

In 1950, Duke University cost $500 a year. Adjusted for inflation, that's about $6,700. Today? Over $70,000 per year. That's nearly $400,000 by graduation.

Here's a wild stat: In the 1980s, a student could pay their entire annual tuition at the University of Washington with one or two months of summer work at KFC.

Try that today. A full-time summer job at $15 an hour would only cover 52% of in-state public tuition. And that's at a public school.

So what changed?

In the 1970s, politicians like Ronald Reagan pushed an ideological shift. Higher education used to be seen as a public good worth subsidizing, like roads or libraries. The new thinking? Education is a private investment. Students should pay for it themselves.

Then in the 1990s, the government removed borrowing limits on student loans. Colleges realized something beautiful (for them): if students could borrow unlimited money, schools could charge unlimited prices.

So they did.Tuition exploded. Loan balances exploded. And suddenly, getting a degree meant signing up for decades of debt.

Here's where it gets interesting. You'd think the people with the most debt would be struggling the most. But that's not true. People who borrow $100,000+ for medical school or law school? They're actually the least likely to default.

The real crisis is hiding in plain sight. 40% of people with student loans dropped out without getting a degree.These borrowers are more likely to be Black, Hispanic, first-generation college students, or from low-income areas. Their average debt? Only about $13,000. But their delinquency rate is four times higher than graduates.

Think about how cruel that is. The system takes billions of dollars from students who never even get the degree they were promised. They have the debt. They don't have the credential. They're stuck paying for a bridge that ended halfway across the river.

Meanwhile, 35% of students graduate with zero debt. The average graduate from a four-year university actually owes about $28,000, not $39,000. The bigger number includes people who went to grad school or graduated years ago and haven't paid it down. Context matters. But even with context, the picture isn't pretty.

Let's say you do everything right. You graduate. You have "only" $28,000 in debt. Now what? Welcome to 2025, where AI is eliminating the exact entry-level jobs you were trained for. Data entry? Gone. Basic research? Automated. Administrative work? AI handles it now. Employers used to care about your GPA. In the past, 75% screened for it. Today? Only 38%.

What do they want instead? Experience.

Which creates the most infuriating paradox in the job market: entry-level positions that require 3-5 years of experience. You need experience to get experience. You need a job to pay off the loans you took to get qualified for the job you can't get. Meanwhile, your interest keeps compounding.

New legislation called the "Big Beautiful Bill" is about to make everything harder. Starting after 2025, if any of your loans get forgiven, you'll have to pay taxes on the forgiven amount as if it were income.

Federal subsidized loans? Gone. That means interest starts ticking from day one, not after you graduate. There are also new caps on federal borrowing. Which sounds reasonable until you realize what happens when students hit those caps: they're forced toward private loans with interest rates as high as 23%. Twenty-three percent. That's credit card territory. For education.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: the old college-to-career pipeline is broken. A four-year degree used to be a golden ticket. Now it's often just an expensive piece of paper. Some alternatives are emerging. Programs like Course Careers teach practical skills for under $500. Trade schools offer real credentials in months, not years. Apprenticeships provide experience while you earn.

The market increasingly rewards people who can solve problems, not people who can show a diploma. This doesn't mean college is worthless. Doctors need medical school. Engineers need engineering degrees. But blindly following the "go to college" advice without thinking about ROI is financial suicide.

A $100,000 psychology degree for a $44,000 starting salary? The math doesn't work.

Student debt doesn't just drain your bank account. It reshapes your entire life. Graduates are delaying buying houses because they can't save for down payments. They're postponing having children because they can't afford them. They're taking soul-crushing jobs just to make minimum payments, instead of doing work that actually matters.

Niche cancer research? Public defense? Teaching? These careers don't pay enough to service $50,000+ in debt. So the brilliant minds who could be solving society's biggest problems are instead grinding away at corporate jobs they hate, paying off loans for degrees they're not even using.

Other countries figured this out already. Germany, Scotland, and Iceland charge zero tuition. The UK uses an income-based repayment system that works like a tax, so you only pay when you can afford to.

In America, we could cap interest rates. We could make public universities tuition-free. We could stop asking 17-year-olds to make six-figure financial decisions before they can legally buy a beer. Benjamin Franklin said an investment in education gives the best returns. He was right.

But what we have isn't an investment in education. It's a trap disguised as opportunity.

You've been sold a lie wrapped in a diploma. The cost of college has disconnected from reality. The job market has turned against graduates. The debt follows you for decades.

This isn't about personal responsibility. This is a systemic failure designed to extract maximum money from people at the most vulnerable point in their lives. The student loan crisis is real. The dropout crisis hiding inside it is worse. And until something changes, your entire generation is paying the price.

The bridge is broken. Stop blaming people for falling in the water.