Noam Scheiber

It's no small matter.

And actually, we see that when people max out on their own debt, their parents even step in to pick up the difference.

So it's even larger than that doubling in some respects.

That's right.

And then the whole thing kind of falls apart around 2008.

The Great Recession and financial crisis hits during this time.

Millions of people lose their jobs or have trouble finding work.

Right.

But in a way, this is kind of a uniquely sharp blow to these young college grads.

Why?

Well, because remember, these were the folks who were probably given the hardest sell about why they need to go to college—

any generation in history.

They had these sky-high expectations.

They really thought of college as something that you should pretty much do everything you can to attain.

And yet when they leave college and they enter the job market with this huge amount of debt, suddenly they're scrambling to find jobs that are in line with what they've studied.

We see the unemployment rate for recent college grads jump to its highest level in decades.

And if you recall what's going on in 2008 and 2009, debt is just this huge problem.

We have whole financial institutions that are collapsing under the weight of it.

And what happens is that the government intervenes very aggressively to bail out these large financial institutions.

But for the people who went to college and who did everything that they thought they were supposed to do and are stuck with this debt that's suddenly weighing them down.