The article referenced $24k per borrower
The article referenced $23.3k per borrower, and about a third of graduates do not borrow at all in order to go to college. Which means that the average graduate borrows about 2/3*$23,300=$15,400.
and the top 10% owe more than $54k and top 3% owe more than $100k.
So the 93
rd percentile of recent college graduates by indebtedness, the people way at the extreme, have a $627 monthly payment on their debt if they borrowed from expensive private lenders at 7%. So what? That is an extreme case, after all.
Even if you went to an expensive private school and majored in art history, and you managed to place yourself all the way at the 93
rd percentile of all college graduates for indebtedness, you could do fine. Let's say half of the loans are public, borrowed at the standard 3.4% rate, that you wait tables with your art history degree, and you make $12/hr ($24,000/year). The
calculator on
studentaid.ed.gov estimates that even without any tax deductions or a spouse, you'd pay $90 a month for your federal loans. If you had $10k in tax deductions, and so you'd report $14k AGI to the IRS, your IBR payment would drop to $0. That leaves $313.49 a month, or $3,761.88 a year in payments if you borrowed the rest from a private lender at 7%. Even if you're exceptionally financially illiterate and
manage to borrow more than 93% of college students do to go to school and you
still only manage to make $12 an hour waiting tables (that is, you're only mediocre at it) , only
16% of your income goes towards your loans. That's hardly hellacious.