I don't know that that's "worse than we thought". The data is just a mathematical extrapolation of one cohort to another. If anything, it'll be a lot worse because the 1996 cohort had three years to insulate themselves from the dot-com crash while the 2004 cohort had three years to insulate themselves from the Great Recession. Having been through both, the 2004 cohort got fucked. If anything, this analysis masks just how bad it's likely to be by presuming there's been no history for the past 20 years. Worse than that, there was about a trillion dollars of student loan debt in the United States. Fully a fifth of that belongs to senior citizens. (Dec 2016) It's now a trillion and a half. On the flip side, the 1996 cohort was paying an average of 9% interest. The 2004 cohort is paying an average of 4. Don't ask me why this graph is backwards. But the big question is how much voting do the holders of this student loan debt do? Because this is a gimme issue. This is low-hanging fruit. And when the Republicans side with Betsy DeVos, they give the Democrats a lay-up. Student loan debt is as terrible as it is because it's virtually impossible to discharge. And nobody wants to talk about the interest-to-principal ratio. That data just isn't available. But if it's anything like my wife's, it's 2:1. Do... you want to die on the hill of defending a trillion dollar industry whose sole purpose is to make money destroying the livelihood of millennials?As a result, over the last decade student debt loads for Americans ages 50 to 64 have more than quadrupled, soaring from $43 billion to $183 billion.
The problem is that there are so many layups for democrats, and they can't/won't get that message to potential voters. It's almost laughable how little most of these affected people pay attention to the world (anecdotally, the people I met while teaching at a for-profit shithole (the actual intended use for that word) were not ones who I would describe as 'politically engaged'). I'm no media mogul, but it'd almost be worth just paying Kendall Jenner to run Instagram ads about student debt or voting rights or that fact that we have an illiterate racist who just raised their taxes manning our nuclear arsenal or any of the layups that dems should score. Instead I'm sure they'll stick with "going high". It'll probably work this time.
I'm not sure that the Democratic establishment will be trusted to run things on this one. Do you really think Chelsea Manning said "Hey, guys, I'm thinking of running against a nine-term rep, two-term senate incumbent - Y'all cool with that?" The issue isn't the folx racking up student loan debt - it's the folx who already have it. Last year I helped my supervisor figure out the student loans he took out to send his son to college. His son has three kids of his own. Dude had to move into a smaller apartment to pay for an education fifteen years amortized.