>So a 10% hit to your income for at least 20 years isn't significant?
It's not a 10% hit to your income. It's 10% of your income over 1.5x the poverty limit. And it's capped at whatever the payments would be under a 10 year repayment plan.
And it's not at least 20 years, it's at most 20 years. If you make more $80k or so you'll pay less under the standard 10 year plan, so you'll pay that. Which for $40k in deb is something like $450 a month (about 6.75% of your income).
>So... your suggestion is to live just above poverty so you won't have to pay student loans?
That's clearly what I said...of course it's not. The point is that worst case scenario you make under 1.5x the poverty limit you make nothing. If you make a little more than that you pay a 10% tax on the money over that (up to about $60k then it goes down).
>Sure, there exists ways to go about getting a degree which doesn't _have_ to have a massive financial burden for decades, but what percentage of degree holders (Or, those who have student loans) took this path? Is this a pragmatically fair expectation for 17/18 year olds to make?
In 2020 around 6% of students took out private student loans. And private student loans represent only around 7% of all student loan debt, so most of them don't have a massive financial burden because they qualify for income based repayment.
>How do you resolve the "while the total average balance (including private loan debt) may be as high as $41,618"[0]
The vast majority of that is federal, which qualifies for IBR, so isn't a massive burden. Don't take out private loans unless you're going to an Ivy League school, or med school.