Sentenced to debt.

• Author: Ross, Scot
• Position: Student loan debt

SARA GRAVES IS A MARRIED, thirty-year-old mother of three with a college degree. She also has upwards of $25,000 in student loan debt, on which she pays an interest rate of 6.5 percent. "She's one of nearly forty million Americans who collectively owe in the neighborhood of $1.2 trillion in student loan debt. That accounts for the second largest consumer debt in the country, exceeding credit cards and car loans and trailing only mortgage debt.

When discussing her situation, Graves worries about her children. "I made the correct decisions," she says, "but the extra burden of the student debt that I'm dealing with right now is definitely delaying our initial plan of saving money for our children so that they wouldn't be in this position."

As a working, single mother in her early twenties, Graves decided her best path to a good middle-class life was to enter college as a nontraditional student. Her determination and drive were clear.

"I sat down with my adviser," she said. "I figured out exactly which courses I needed to take to get my degree. I didn't have any extra fluff courses in my curriculum. I completely just went straight through, worked really hard, got the credits that I needed to get the degree, and in the end it cost me more money than it would have had I just gone about it nonchalantly and not rushed my way through it."

Graves attended college year round. But because of the limitations on yearly aid, she racked up student loan debt she would have otherwise avoided had she taken longer to graduate.

Like millions of other college graduates, Graves is carrying around a debilitating debt.

As Senator Tammy Baldwin puts it, student loan debt is "a defining issue of our generation." Since 1985, college tuition has gone up 559 percent, and with it, massive indebtedness. In a nationwide survey of more than 61,000 individuals conducted by One Wisconsin Institute, those with student loan debt reported an average length of repayment of twenty-one years, ranging from seventeen years for those with some college but no degree up to twenty-three years for debtors with graduate degrees.

Respondents shared some of the real-life economic consequences of this debt. Rates of home ownership were 36 percent lower among individuals still paying on student loans versus those who have already paid them off. And almost two out of three of those currently repaying a student loan purchased a used car instead of a new one.

Robert Hiltonsmith, a policy analyst...