Loan article- depressing!

"These trends have intersected before -- paying off college loans has never been easy, and earlier generations have had to contend with weak job markets. But they are felt more keenly today. Almost two-thirds of students have to borrow money to get through school; as many as one-quarter may be accumulating credit-card debt to help pay for tuition. The median debt for college graduates in 2004 was $15,162, an increase of 66.5% since 1993.That may not seem like a crippling sum, but plenty of individuals owe much more. Back in 1993, only 4.2% of graduates had loans exceeding $25,000. A decade later, 17% did.Today's 30-year-olds are also the first generation for whom having a credit card was a rite of passage. Most of their parents couldn't get a credit card until well after graduation. But beginning in the early 1990s, students have been bombarded by tempting offers at a time when they were just scraping by. For those whose financial education had scarcely begun, it seemed like free money: Spend a couple of hundred dollars and only pay the minimum balance of $10 a month. So students used their cards to buy computers, clothes, gas, textbooks and sometimes even to pay for tuition.Living with debt has become perfectly acceptable: Last year 76% of college students had credit cards and their average debt was $2,169. "We wink at the magical thinking that credit-card companies encourage us to engage in," says Darryl Dahlheimer, a program manager at Lutheran Social Service Financial Counseling in Minneapolis. "The bitter 30-year-olds are the ones who are still paying off the pizza they ate when they were 20."

http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/CollegeandFamily/Moneyinyour20s/P137030.asp