Student loan rate hikes unfair: Column

• Average graduates are beginning their post-graduate working lives with about %2427%2C000 in debt.
• Even if we were nearer to full employment conditions%2C the debt burden would still be a great impediment.
• The kids today just aren%27t getting the deal that earlier generations were given.

With federally subsidized student loan rates for newly issued loan rates doubling to 6.8%, significantly increasing the cost of borrowing to pay for college tuition, it's worth examining whether the expectations we've placed on supposedly "responsible" young people are at all reasonable. Can we expect students to manage to get degrees and then obtain jobs, pay down debt, save for a mortgage down payment, and become financially secure enough to consider getting married and having children in a timely enough fashion? And let's not forget beginning to save for retirement.

None of these steps in life is strictly necessary, except perhaps saving for retirement. One can potentially find decent careers without a college education, stay debt free, remain a renter, and choose not to get married or raise children. Still this basic path through life is the template we generally present to our children as the responsible path to success. It's supposedly the standard path to personal and financial stability, and to middle class prosperity, for those not born into significant wealth. But how realistic is it, with or without the recent increase in student loan interest rates?

Average graduates are beginning their post-graduate working lives with about $27,000 in debt. Even those lucky enough to obtain good jobs (including benefits) in this still seriously depressed labor market are starting off deep in the hole. It's likely unworkable for them to shed this debt while simultaneously saving for a down payment and beginning the process of putting away money for retirement. Maybe hard-working people in their twenties should even have some extra time and money for a bit of fun, travel, and dating too?

The recession and subsequent weak labor market have certainly exacerbated the financial pressures that graduates face, but even if we were nearer to full employment conditions, the typical debt burden would still be a great impediment. Decades of stagnant real wages have been accompanied by massive increases in both public and private college costs. Student debt is high because the cost of attending college is high, and the burden of that debt is higher given the failure of wages to keep up.

Even if we think that expensive private colleges are a luxury that students without significant parental financial backing should steer clear of given the cost, we are no longer offering new students the alternative public option that people my age and older were given. According to the U.S. Department of Education, the average cost of tuition, fees, and board at a 4-year public institution, adjusted for inflation, rose from $6,381 in 1980 to $15,605 in 2010. Public higher education now costs more than double what it did back then.

When I began attending a state university in 1989, the option for people to work their way through that school with little to no parental support and minimal loans was a realistic, if difficult, one. The kids today just aren't getting the deal that earlier generations were given. We should not be blind to the fact that their options are much more costly now.

Ultimately the issue is that the expectations placed upon young adults just starting out are based on an outdated understanding of the the opportunities our society is providing for them. If people my age and older want the younger generation to follow the path that was laid out for us, and we rhetorically lay out for them, then we need to relieve the need for them to become deeply in debt before their 22nd birthday in order to do so.

Duncan Black writes the blogEschatonunder the pseudonym of Atrios and is a fellow at Media Matters for America.

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