In a recent Guardian article, MH Miller discusses the impact of living with a $100,000 student loan debt and of being incapacitated by that debt for many years:
Now 30, I have been incapacitated by debt for a decade. The delicate balancing act that my family and I perform in order to make a payment each month has become the organising principle of our lives...
After 10 years of living with the fallout of my own decisions about my education, I have come to think of my debt as like an alcoholic relative from whom I am estranged, but who shows up to ruin happy occasions. But when I first got out of school and the reality of how much money I owed finally struck me, the debt was more of a constant and explicit preoccupation, a matter of life and death.
In many cases, student loan debt allows people to borrow money they have no hope of repaying, transforms the post graduation years into an economic wasteland, and defers, for many decades, the borrower's ability to participate personally in the normal milestones of life like buying a home, starting a family, starting a business, or retiring. Economist Steve Keen states that student loan debt:
[W]ill doom the [country] to stagnation: a generation with too much debt and no prospect of using credit like the previous generation.
As one commentator stated, student loan debts are a place where nightmares are real.