[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Higher education is the only industry that has outpaced health care in cost increases in the last ten years. The debt that students have taken on in pursuit of their degrees is unprecedented. That doesn’t mean a college degree isn’t worth some debt, but student debt has proven to be more than a little problem, as young graduates are being forced to prolong their progression through many vital stages associated with adulthood. This, while affecting young people on a personal scale, also has a major effect on our national economy and is part of why we are in such a slow recovery.

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It used to be expected that young adults fresh out of college were entering into a world of opportunity, ready and excited to start the rest of their lives. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case. With college graduates walking away with an average of $33,000 in debt, as reported by Experian in 2014, people just aren’t in the financial position to begin the next phase of their lives at what used to be considered the optimal times.

With such staggering debt, people are failing to move out of family members’ homes. According to the Pew Research Center and Rutgers, as reported by The Wall Street Journal, “45 percent of college graduates age 24 and under are living back at home or with a family member of some kind.” Additionally, “20- and 30-year-olds are delaying marriage and delaying childbearing.” Each of these factors is important in a growing economy. Additionally, due to a lack of financial stability and spending money, less is being invested in things like homes and cars, which further poses problems for the economy.

Another driving factor, and what arguably made our economy famously powerful, is our industrial risk-taking. But without any money to fall back on, young college grads are not able to take the entrepreneurial chances associated with fulfilling their dreams of, say, starting a business — the sort of chance-taking that kick-started this country’s economic leaps earlier on. The Wall Street Journal reported on Jan. 2 that, “the percentage of younger people who reported owning a part of a new business dropped to 3.6 percent from 6.1 percent” from 2010 to 2013. This downward trend, while primarily due to financial risk, is also associated with a lack of money to even invest in the start-up of a new business. Meanwhile other countries around the globe are surpassing us economically.

President of Purdue University and former Governor of Indiana Mitchell E. Daniels, writing recently for The Wall Street Journal, suggested a couple steps to be taken toward a solution to such damagingly high tuition costs. First off, all colleges have areas where they could reduce the price for students to attend. Purdue University has taken steps to lower the costs of room and board and textbooks in order to reduce the overall cost of attendance for the first time ever recorded. Secondly, he suggests that students be further educated in their financial options in paying for college, so that maybe they can avoid borrowing as much money from the government as they have been. Maybe these steps and other academic efforts will be enough to generate some upward momentum in reproducing the historically recognized American economy we all long to bring back.

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