You are obviously correct. I mean, I am just under 50 grand in debt (I have a masters) and I continue to make my payments every month despite the fact that I ended up marrying a military guy and moving overseas, making it harder for me to make what I could be making. Either way, though, it's what I decided on and I'm owning it. I've never missed a payment.

I do, however, feel like it's unfair to act as if anyone knew that it would get this bad. I went to school before the economy crashed (it crashed when I was in my sophomore year). In high school, I was told over and over that I needed an education. Everyone takes out loans. It's just part of life. My parents tried to get me to do community college first, but if I was going to continue school, I wanted the whole college experience. I don't regret it, per se. Most of the debt I have now comes from my masters degree. What I have realised, though, is that at 18 years old, I was NOT capable of making an informed decision. Maybe others would have been mature enough to consider everything, but I wasn't and I know plenty of others that weren't. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I was told that no one knows so it's fine. This is why I eventually had to go back for another degree. I was the first generation to go to college in my family, so my parents did the best they could to guide me, but ultimately they weren't too experienced in how everything works. too many people have the same, or similar, story to mine. No matter how you want to look at it, we did get sort of screwed over. If my parents knew the economy was going to crash, I'm certain they would have spoken up more and told me not to take on debt. But no one knew what would happen, we did what we were told, I was incredibly young, and here we are.