This is a poorly written article that is leaving out loads of details, but I filled them in differently than you did. I read it that he had 30k in student loan debt when he graduated in 2010 with a degree in business and economics. Couldn't get steady work, so accrued more debt while I'm guessing he deferred his loans while not working (again, details left out so I'm making assumptions), and had to move in with his parents in order to keep his head above water. He's decided against getting a masters degree and gaining more debt because he already took the right path once and he still ended up a bus driver. If he got his loans during that before 2010, it's entirely possible that he's refinanced his loans to 3% and paying them early would be a poor financial move when he's trying catch up his savings/move out. I filled the lines in this way because that's what's happened to my friends.
For me, the more interesting bit was the hypothesis that those kids/students that come of age during recessions are going to forever be behind those that didn't in terms of earning power. “Employers didn’t say, ‘Oops, we missed a generation. In 2008 we weren’t hiring graduates, let’s hire all the people we passed over.’ No, they hired the class of 2012.”
This has been my experience. I opted to go back and get my masters for no other reason than my bachelors got stale and wasn't getting me interviews, but then I was lucky to graduate with my MBA into an environment that was hiring. It's all a gamble though. It's entirely possible that I'd have ended up with 80k in student debt working at Starbucks instead of making 6 figures doing analytics; for me, I'm reasonably sure that had one interview gone differently, that would be the case actually. So I understand why people are hesitate to try again when there isn't a clear path forward.
I wasn't able to get to the end of the article though because holy crap all that bouncing around/visualization was freaking annoying and made reading hard. I think I stopped around the bit where they randomly threw in ads and I starred at them trying to figure out wtf they had to do with the article before realizing that they were fake ads that were tangentially related to the content, kinda.