By The Numbers

So much of the student loan "debate" - like many others, but this one was Al Bundy's big game to them - was led by elite school weirdos who were absolutely allergic to anyone trying to explain the reality of student debt to them.

Our student debt research uses credit reports, both from an annual, representative cross-section of student borrowers and from a single group of borrowers we’ve been following since 2009. We found that counterintuitively, the repayment pause was the best thing that ever happened to help student loans get repaid. That’s because in normal times, student debt balances mostly increase, thanks to monthly interest payments many borrowers are unable to keep up with. In 2020, 60.7 percent of outstanding student loans had a higher balance than when they were first issued. By 2022, that number had declined to 53.7 percent because interest was waived during the pandemic and some borrowers continued to pay down their principal.

tl;dr The debt isn't/can't be repaid, ever, by most people because the promised "college premium" associated with a degree when 17-year-olds signed their loan papers did not and will not materialize.