KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • President Joe Biden’s student loan debt relief measures have largely come out of pandemic financial relief efforts.
  • However, the student loan debt burden has been building since the 1980s, when tuition and other college costs began to grow faster than inflation.
  • In the past two decades, families have accumulated student loan debt, preventing them from buying houses, getting married and having children.

Holly Humbert and her husband have had student loans hanging over them since shortly after the Great Recession.

Back in those days, she and her husband were raising a young child while he was in college and she worked for $10 an hour at a call center. At the time, the ability to take out student loans seemed like a godsend, and they borrowed as much as they were allowed, to help pay for their living expenses as well as tuition. After he graduated, she went to school, necessitating even more loans.

“We were really young when we got married and had kids so our earning potential was just really low while we were in school,” Humbert said.

The latest efforts at student loan reform started during the pandemic and many of President Joe Biden’s relief measures were justified as pandemic aid. However, the debt burden crisis was brewing long before COVID-19. For many like Humbert’s family, student loans have been dragging on their finances for decades.

College tuition has gotten pricier over the years, rising far faster than inflation. In the 2021-2022 school year, the average cost of tuition, room, board, and fees across all public and private colleges was $26,903.1 That’s nearly triple the $10,204 paid for the same costs in 1979-1980 in inflation-adjusted dollars.

At the same time, a college education increasingly became the ticket to earning at least a middle-class salary, and the lifestyle that went along with it.