Throughout childhood, we were told a college education is the path to financial success. Forget about the exorbitant price tag, they said. A degree will open up lucrative opportunities, which are well worth the debt you’ll accrue.
But in today’s job market, graduates are having doors slammed in their faces. All they’re left with is crippling student debt.
The unemployment rate for recent college graduates is 6%, compared to the official 4% rate for all workers. According to the Bureau of Labor statistics, an astounding 42% of recent college graduates are working jobs that don’t require a college degree.
Meanwhile, total student debt in the US stands at a record $1.8 trillion. That’s an average of around $44,000 per borrower.
Experts are warning of a multi-trillion dollar “tsunami” of student debt defaults. As of August 2026, a record 20% of US borrowers were in default—over 270 days behind on payment. Another 10% are “seriously delinquent”—over 90 days behind.
What triggered the current crisis
Student loan payments were paused in 2020 as borrowers struggled to keep up amid pandemic-era chaos. The pause came to an end in 2023. Biden gave borrowers a “gracious” transition period of nine months to resume payments, and introduced the SAVE program, an income-based repayment system which just barely kept an estimated eight million borrowers’ heads above water.
SAVE was in effect for about two years before being ripped away by the Trump administration. The “Big Beautiful Bill” made massive cuts to social spending, and overhauled existing payment plans to be more punishing to debtors.
One borrower described the heart-dropping feeling of finding out his repayment plan had been overhauled: “It feels like your mortgage lender calling you and saying, ‘Hey . . . we’re going to add five years and $100,000 to your mortgage.’”
Default rates skyrocketed. The majority of borrowers who were previously enrolled in the SAVE program saw an increase of more than $500 a month. 37% of Americans can’t afford a one-time emergency expense of $400, much less a sudden hike in monthly payments.
By June of last year, five million borrowers had defaulted. In the year since, that figure has doubled to ten million—an all-time high.
Southern states have the largest share of newly defaulted borrowers. Mississippi tops the chart with a default rate over 28%.
To add insult to injury, borrowers in default could have up to 15% of their take-home pay garnished directly from their paychecks, at a time when millions of Americans are already struggling to keep up with rising inflation.
Democrats laid the groundwork
Democrats played a key role in creating the crisis, which traces its roots to Obama’s education “reforms.” In 2010, Obama restructured the system by taking federal student loans away from private banks and handing them over to the Department of Education. The idea was to “free” the banks from the risk of lending to students in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis.
For universities, the deal was even sweeter. Even if an 18 year old would never be able to pay back a federal loan for a $350,000 liberal arts degree, the university would still get paid—on the taxpayer’s dime.
Naturally, they hiked tuition to milk this as much as possible, expanding the market for both federally backed and private student loans. Even though the average federal financial-aid package has tripled over the last 30 years, tuition paid by students out-of-pocket has also jumped by an astounding 93%. Some universities now boast an annual price tag over $100,000.
Put simply, the Democrats built a system where taxpayers, families, and students hemorrhage money into the pockets of big banks and university bureaucrats.
Abolish student debt!
A workers’ government will abolish student debt overnight. By expropriating the trillions of dollars that capitalists are hoarding, and nationalizing all higher education institutions under student, faculty, and staff control, everyone could be guaranteed a free and quality education.
In 1848, Horace Mann, the father of American public education, said schools were “the great equalizer of the conditions of men” and “the grand agent for the development or augmentation of national resources.” Nowadays, these agents of development have turned into agents of parasitism and decline. Under a socialist planned economy, they would once again become “grand agents for the development and augmentation”—not only of national resources—but of humanity as a whole.