Average student loan debt for college students graduating in 2010 was $25K.
Unemployment rate for young college graduates was 9.1% in 2010. But for young high school graduates, it was 20.4%.
Taking on $25K of debt for an education that puts you in an unemployment bracket of 9% vs 20% doesn’t seem like a bad tradeoff.
Of course that is on average, you can always find extreme and non-representative cases. The French literature major with $150K debt and so on. From an overall societal point of view, why should we care about those extreme cases?
By the way, note that very roughly 20% of student loan debt is private loans (the most expensive kind), 80% is govt-guaranteed loans (federal, state). And that private for-profit colleges have the highest graduating student debt levels and the highest percent of private loans. I suspect, but don’t have data, that these colleges have commercial relationships with the lenders and thus steer students toward those loans rather than the lower-cost govt-guaranteed loans. Bias disclosure – I think the private for-profit education industry is for the most part a bad thing, they recruit unqualified students, push them into expensive and inappropriate educations, and have a poor post-graduate employment record. The industry is under investigation by the Federal govt which I think is long overdue.
See info here:
http://projectonstudentdebt.org/files/pub/classof2010.pdf