This election cycle, it’s the student loans, stupid.

For the first time ever, student debt is playing a prominent role in a presidential campaign. Candidates are unveiling their proposals to reform higher education seemingly every day as they play to the approximately 40 million Americans struggling with student loan debt that’s worth about $1.2 trillion. Though the candidates’ plans range from debt-free college to pairing students with private investors to finance their tuition, almost every one of the 20 people running for president has been forced to address the issue of college affordability in some way.

That’s because a combination of skyrocketing college costs, sluggish wage growth and the boost in college enrollment during the recession has pushed student debt to a “tipping point,” such that most American families are now touched by the issue in some way, said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank.

“Student debt is something that is almost universal among the generation that’s really coming online politically,” he said. Political candidates have been dropping the phrase “debt-free college” so regularly that Huelsman’s organization along with the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and the American Federation of Teachers released a checklist for reporters and supporters to evaluate if a plan truly offers debt-free college for all.

Stance on student loans

See where each presidential candidate stands on the issue of student loan debt.

It wasn’t always this way. In the early days of the nation’s student loan program, candidates and presidents touted their records on expanding access to student loans. When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Higher Education Act into law in 1965, he hawked the new government-backed student loan program as “a source of encouragement to capable young people who need training to become useful and productive citizens.”

“The original impetus of student loans was that this was something that is supposed to help poor kids,” said Joel Best, a professor at the University of Delaware who co-authored “The Student Loan Mess: How Good Intentions Created a Trillion-Dollar Problem,” with his son, Eric. “If you go through the presidential papers, you’ll see that if they refer to student loans it’s always in this very positive sense that ‘yes we did something to make it possible for the student loan program to expand or continue.’”

In fact, after Congress expanded eligibility for the student loan program to include middle-income students in 1978, many representatives went home and campaigned on the issue while running for reelection, according to John Thelin, the author of “A History of American Higher Education.”

“It was very popular,” said Thelin, who is also a professor at the University of Kentucky. “What was a windfall 35 to 40 years ago is now seen as a real nightmare, particularly for students.”

In those intervening years, a college degree became increasingly necessary to access the middle class and at the same time cuts to state funding and administrative bloat at colleges has pushed tuition up. The result is that debt is now a primary way students and families finance college – about 70% of bachelor’s degree recipients graduate with loans.

Developments in recent years have pushed the issue of student loans more into the forefront of the political conversation. For one, the dangers of taking on debt to attend just any school have become more clear, as more borrowers struggle to pay back loans they took out to attend for-profit schools now mired in scandal.

President Barack Obama is also partially responsible for student debt’s prevalence on the campaign trail. His administration drew more attention to the issue than most with splashy proposals like free community college and a publicized crackdown on for-profit colleges.

“It’s forced everybody to discuss it,” said Andrew Kelly, the director of the Center for Higher Education Reform at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

Finally, the Great Recession and slow recovery brought home the importance of a college degree in today’s economy for many Americans. Though they still suffered from high levels of un- and underemployment during the downturn, bachelor’s degree recipients fared much better than their counterparts who only finished high school.

“There’s a sense that the economy has changed and it’s hard to reach the middle class these days with just a high school diploma,” Kelly said. “The recession really helped to crystalize it for people.”

All of these factors mean that there’s certainly a captive audience for candidates’ plans to address student debt – 71% of voters support the idea of access to debt-free college, according to a poll published by PCCC earlier this year -- but it remains to be seen whether the issue will drive voters to the polls.

“It’s not as though somebody’s position on higher education is going to make or break an entire coalition, but it’s part of a package of ideas that speak to concerns of the middle class that is really important,” said Kelly.

A candidate’s stance on college affordability may sway some voters, particularly if it’s portrayed as part of a broader historical pattern of increasing access to education, said Heulsman. He notes that free K-12 public school wasn’t always the norm, but policymakers made a choice to offer it once it became clear that Americans would need that education to get by and ultimately grow the economy.

“In that sense, higher education affordability and removing the burden of student debt tells a powerful story of opportunity,” he said.