Here's How Much Students Spent at Public Colleges Compared to Total U.S. Student Debt

"We're at a really interesting and troubling point where student debt has become sort of normalized," Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at the think tank Demos, told Mic. "Tuition used to be low enough and grant aid used to be high enough that total cost of attendance at higher university was manageable with a summer job."

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"For what we're spending now, we could reroute that money into a tuition guarantee for students in public schools," Huelsman told Mic. If the U.S. embraced universal access to higher education, it would be following a number of other countries. Norway, Finland, Denmark, Germany and Sweden all charge $0.00 in tuition, and average education costs across the developed world are typically far lower than in the United States.