Recession recedes, but student woes continue "The overall picture points to continued signs of healing in consumer credit markets," the report concludes. Yet there is one very striking exception. Even as more people are taking out student loans to get through school, the people who have taken them out already appear to be struggling - even more than they were during the recession. The amount of student loan debt has tripled since 2004 and stands today at nearly $1 trillion. "Student debt is the only kind of household debt that continued to rise through the Great Recession and has now the second largest balance after mortgage debt," the report notes. At the same time, however, the rate of serious delinquencies among those with student loans has risen to 17 percent. Moreover, the delinquency rate is expected to rise in the near future as more student loans move beyond their forbearance period, when no repayment is expected, to the time when the borrowers must pay. Many of those who borrowed no doubt envisioned that a college education would yield a better financial future for themselves. Indeed, the median weekly earnings of workers with a bachelor's degree or higher are roughly double those of high school graduates. The unemployment rates for those with bachelor's degrees are much lower, too. Those advantages to a college degree have helped drive a boom in college loans. The number of people borrowing has risen 70 percent since 2004, according to the report. So, too, has the average loan balance. Today, the average loan balance stands at about $25,000 per person. But as the rising delinquency rate suggests, those investments aren't working out for all students. Anthony P. Carnevale, director of Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce, said too few students take into account how much they will earn after four years studying, say, Shakespeare. His research has shown that while some degrees, especially in technical fields, can yield a healthy income, others do not. "This money is too easy," Carnevale said. We're just throwing money out the window. We don't demand that the students, or the institutions, or the government which is subsidizing these loans, take any responsibility to make sure that this money is well-invested.