Total student loan debt outstanding

Babies named Maverick and student-loan-debt totals, both climbing. The kid named for breakaway optimism will, statistically, graduate into the highest debt cohort in American history. The name is harder to retire than the loan.

Maverick climbed Social Security baby-name charts steadily across this window, lifted further by Top Gun: Maverick (2022). US student loan debt outstanding grew from about 500 billion to over 1.7 trillion dollars in the same window as enrolment expanded and tuition outpaced inflation. Two unrelated trends sharing a window because the same eighteen years inflated both a hopeful name choice and a sobering debt balance. Different futures, same household.

The country named optimistically and borrowed steeply. Both lines were going somewhere.