This week, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York offered continuing evidence of the student debt crisis. Outstanding student debt again topped $1 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2013, making it the second-largest pool of debt in the nation behind mortgages. This has tripled in just a decade, as higher-education prices increased faster than medical costs, up 500 percent since 1985. While delinquency rates for all loans have trended downward for the past three years, student loan delinquencies have surged; currently 11.5 percent of all student loans are 90 days behind or more.

The recent explosion in student debt—now held by one in five U.S. households—coincided with the Great Recession’s awful job market. Millennials have come of age amid stagnant wages, high unemployment, a lack of quality jobs (44 percent of recent graduates work in positions that don’t require a college degree), and, for those fortunate enough to attend college, an average of nearly $30,000 in debt.

All this has led to what we can call the Great Delay. The normal milestones of adulthood—moving out of the childhood home, buying a car, getting a mortgage—are coming later and later in life. Could the way we finance higher education in America be sucking the vitality out of the economy, digging an entire generation a hole from which they cannot escape?

First-time homebuyers accounted for just over one-quarter of all sales over the past year, far lower than the historic average. That percentage was even lower for households under age 40. All-cash home purchases, by contrast, hit 42 percent of sales last November, according to RealtyTrac. Recent college graduates typically don’t have that kind of money lying around.

While weak wages and high unemployment for young people explains much of the problem, an analysis from the New York Fed offers compelling evidence for the role of student debt. In 2012, 30-year-olds were more likely to have a mortgage if they had no student debt than if they did. The same trend held for vehicle purchases. In one way, this makes no sense—college graduates have much higher average wages than their counterparts, and should have a higher percentage of auto and home purchases. But student debt is holding them back. Indeed, you can say that student debt is crowding out other forms of credit. For example, high student loan delinquencies damage credit scores, often putting access to credit out of reach. Just having a student loan increases overall debt, making it hard to qualify for other loans, especially under new mortgage rules that limit total debt for a would-be borrower to 43 percent of their annual income.