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Comment by bdzr | Hacker News Reader

Reminder that the average student loan debt is somewhere in the ballpark of $40k with the median being a little lower. I've found that most of the coverage on student loans misleadingly focuses on outliers.

Edit: downvoted for factual information :-/.

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That's absolutely true, but let's not forget that $40k financed over 10 years is about $400/month payment and about $10k in interest of the loan duration.

That's a lot of money monthly. That's a car payment, or groceries, or a lot other consumption that isn't happening.

Sure, though I can't cite the source off hand, I remember the statistic being something like a bachelor's degree of any kind increases earnings by roughly 17k. It's very hard to consider this anything other than a bargain for the average bachelor's student, interest included. AFAIR the stats show that the people who are truly destroyed are the ones who get loans but don't get the piece of paper.

Yep, that's a big problem. And if I'm remembering correctly, that problem was vastly worse with the for-profit schools (actual for-profit like Capella and WyoTech, not privates like Harvard or Georgetown, which are still non-profit).

And for the average graduate, yeah, it usually works out in the end, but there can definitely be cash-flow problems in the early phases of careers (thinking about teachers and other "service" jobs that require/prefer college but don't pay well).

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