The growth in college debt continues unabated because borrowers are not paying down their balances, often intentionally.
In finance, and in the world in general, few things move in a perfectly linear line. Markets and economies rise and recede. Demographic trends shift over time. Life itself is full of twists and turns.
The growth in U.S. student-loan debt, on the other hand, has been entirely predictable for the past 17 years, rising to $1.5 trillion:
Charts simply don’t get much more linear than that. This trend, of course, has fueled a national debate about student loans and is why Democratic candidates for president such as Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders have made college-debt forgiveness a pillar of their economic platforms. The costs of young Americans saddled with onerous debt burdens are well-chronicled: declining homeownership rates, dwindling small businesses, delaying marriage and putting off having children.
This is not the whole picture, however. Even though the growth looks perfectly linear, the reason for it began to change almost a decade ago.