$600B additional student debt over 10 years sounded high to me, so I did the ballpark check. $600B over 10 years is $60B/year. There are about 20 million coll

$600B additional student debt over 10 years sounded high to me, so I did the ballpark check. $600B over 10 years is $60B/year. There are about 20 million college students [1]. That means $3000 per student per year on average. If loans are paid back over 10-20 years, this really says that students are borrowing $3000 more per year than they were 10-20 years ago. The article suggested that borrowing was about $600B total, 10 years ago, so essentially it has doubled. FWIW, CPI inflation over the last 20 years is ~50%, the other 50% is either real increase in borrowing or due to the fact that college tuition rates have been increasing faster than inflation. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372