Student loans are gradually becoming a crisis.  At the macro level, student loans are the only sector of consumer finance that is growing since the recession began 3 years ago.  Federal student loans outstanding now total more than $1 trillion.  That’s more than total credit card debt.  From Mybudget360.com:

Student loan debt only segment of household debt expanding

The Federal Reserve tracks federally backed student loan debt and the figures are astounding.  The only sector of household debt that has expanded in manic fashion during this recession is with student loans:

Every sector has taken a hit including:

-Home equity revolving debt

-Automobile loans

-Credit card debt

-Other debt

Yet there goes student loan debt saddling countless students with back breaking debt.  Make no mistake, much of the for-profits are growing simply because of the government:

“(USA Today) For profit-schools. The highest default rates are at for-profit schools that tend to serve lower-income students and offer courses online. The University of Phoenix, the nation’s largest, got 88% of its revenue from federal programs last year, most of it from student loans.”

This is absolutely nonsense and shows how the coupling of Wall Street and the government have simply turned education into another commodity to water down and gamble on.  Like the multiple card game tables in Las Vegas higher education is the hottest game in town.

But unlike credit card debt, student loan cannot be reset or forgiven in bankruptcy court.  It’s a permanent burden on the former student.

In theory, the loan shouldn’t be a burden because it was an investment in greater earning power of the former student and now potential worker.  But since this current era of lesser depression or workers depressionbegan, incomes for the college educated have actually declined.  CalculatedRiskBlog quotes from the New York Times recent analyses of U.S. household incomes: (bold emphases are mine)

From the NY Times: Recession Officially Over, U.S. Incomes Kept Falling. A few excerpts:…

And on education:

Median annual income declined most for households headed by someone with an associate’s degree, dropping 14 percent, to $53,195, in the four-year period that ended in June 2011, the report said.

For households headed by people who had not completed high school, median income declined by 7.9 percent, to $25,157. For those with a bachelor’s degree or more, income declined by 6.8 percent, to $82,846.

What’s more, the unemployment rate is also up for graduates (and all other categories). Mybudget360.com puts a graph to the income dynamics:

 Yet if we look at the earnings potential during the bubble years we see a very troubling picture:

Source:  BusinessWeek

Since 2000, in real terms college costs are now up by 23%

Since 2000, in real terms real pay for college graduates is down by 11%

This means potential disaster for graduates and other former students. From Leo Komfield at New America Foundation’s Higher Ed Watch:

The Department of Education recently announced that the national student loan default rate has risen to over 8 percent and we know that this measure provides only a limited view of the troubles that borrowers are having repaying their student loan debt. In the current economy, we can only expect things to get worse unless the Education Department tackles this problem head-on.

Among the defaulters are a large percentage of unemployed college students. It’s bad enough to be unemployed; however, when you add to this difficulty with being classified as a defaulter, you are really in trouble. Defaulting on federal student loans results in a lifetime of financial purgatory — it destroys your credit, making it impossible to obtain a credit card, car loan, and home loan, and it puts you at risk of having your wages garnished, and your tax refunds intercepted by the IRS.

The student loan market is back in the news as it makes its unrelenting march to the $1 trillion mark.  This crippling figure comes in the face of a decade of lost wages for middle class Americans.  Just like the housing bubble people were supplementing a disappearing middle class with more debt.  The allure of housing was that never in our history have we seen national home prices fall, until they did in dramatic fashion.  The same cultural nostalgia for education in every respect has created a zombie higher education system that is now expanding like the mortgage markets at the height of the housing bubble.  Why?  For-profit schools have largely lured in countless Americans into a system that has provided very little economic gains for students while enriching these Wall Street listed companies.  It should come as no surprise that the highest default rates stem from the for-profit system and most of these loans are federal loans.  In 2010 there were $100 billion in student loan originations, the highest ever in the midst of the deepest recession since the Great Depression.

But it also spells a crisis on a much larger scale.  Reports are showing that the OccupyWallStreet movement (#OWS) is partially made up of significant numbers of young people and recent graduates in particular.  These are not the “dirty hippies” and “degenerates” that many conservatives have labeled them.  Rather, they are the people who followed the “rules”. They studied. They went to college.  In large numbers they took responsbility for their future by taking on student loans and investing in their human capital – all things society has told them to do.  Now, almost 4 years since the recession began, there aren’t any jobs for them.  They’ve graduated and now face payments on those loans.  But the jobs simply don’t exist.  When young people are educated and then are denied opportunity, there’s danger for society.  That’s the recipe for revolutions as we’ve seen in Tunisia and Egypt already this year.