Ramy Odeh and his late father Steve both attended the same college, but they had very different experiences.

The elder Odeh started school at the University of Michigan in 1970 after immigrating from the middle east with his wife to the U.S. He studied and worked multiple jobs, even as he and his wife raised seven children. Ramy, 32, funded his college education differently. Ramy’s family helped foot some of the bill — and he took out loans to pay for the rest. He worked at a restaurant while he was a student, but that didn’t help pay for his education.

The cost of school was so high at that time — more than $10,000 a year for an in-state student in 2008, the year he graduated — that a typical college student job could barely make a dent. “It’s almost impossible to go to school now without taking on loans,” Odeh said.

Click here for a graphic comparing college costs 30 years ago vs. 2017

He’s not alone. “You hear the apocryphal story of being able to work your way through school, because it was true,” said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. “If you were a student in 1980 and you took on a full-time summer job and a part-time job in the school year, your college costs would be covered and your living expenses would be covered.”

But things are different these days. Students working in the 2011-2012 academic year had an average of $18,081 in student loans, according to a 2015 report from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. That’s up from $10,139 in the 1989-1990 academic year.

“ “It’s both insulting and ignorant for a baby boomer to say students today should simply work their way through school to avoid debt.” ” — Nicholas Sebastien Moll, 23

Some students still work during college, despite taking on loans

Nicholas Sebastien Moll has felt the burden of the increase in student loan debt all too well. The 23-year-old is taking pains to avoid borrowing money for school. He’s working full-time while attending a community college where courses cost about one-third of classes at a four-year school in-state. Almost every weekday, Moll rushes from class to his eight-hour workday and usually returns home at around 10 p.m., and only then starts his homework.

“The overarching theme of this is stress,” he said. He’s barely been able to see family and friends or sustain a romantic relationship. Moll said his progress through school is slower than he’d like. He can only afford to take classes part-time and he often has to wait multiple semesters to enroll in key courses because of his work schedule. He’s close to finishing his associate’s degree, debt-free, but it’s taken five years.

“I don’t think it should be a necessity for an individual like myself to be crippled with debt for the rest of my life to get a higher education,” he said.

Moll’s experience has made him resent any time that a baby boomer tries to suggest that students today should simply work their way through school to avoid debt. “It’s both insulting and ignorant for anyone to really say that because they have done no thought into the current situation,” he said, noting that college costs more and jobs pay less today than decades ago.

States are investing less in higher education, pushing up costs

At the same time, declining state investment in higher education over the past few decades has pushed costs up, making it more difficult for students to afford school on their smaller salaries. In the late 1980s, public colleges typically got about one-quarter of their revenue from tuition, now that’s up to about 50%, according to Michael Mitchell, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities who studies state funding trends.

Each successive recession in the 1980s, early and mid-2000s pushed states to slash budgets. Few items in a state budget offer as much leeway to legislators to cut as higher education because it can be made up through other revenue streams like tuition, Mitchell said. But economic conditions only go so far in explaining the declines; there’s also been an ideological shift among many legislators about the role of government in funding higher education.

“If you were to go back 30 to 40 years, public funding for higher education was substantial enough that for many students, higher education was very affordable,” Mitchell said. “There has been a shift in how we think about public higher education, not so much as a social good, but as the benefit for the individual. As you make that shift there’s also the idea that the individual is responsible for paying for it.”

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Wages are stagnant and the middle class has struggled to grow

The federal minimum wage hasn’t budged in several years and is worth less now than in the 1960s, meaning that today, most students are earning less than their parents did at similar jobs.

At the same time that families have been asked to shoulder more of the responsibility of the cost of college, they’ve also been struggling to stretch their limited dollars. The wages of middle-class workers have grown just 6% since 1979 and low-wage workers’ wages actually dropped 5% during that period, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.

“Middle-class families certainly didn’t really see much of a raise for 30 years and were contending with obviously higher college prices and other obligations in terms of rising health care prices, rising cost of child care,” said Huelsman. “That is part of the story here, it’s not just rising college costs.”

The student loan system emerged in the background of these shifts. President Lyndon B. Johnson established the federal student loan program in 1965, announcing its creation outside of the alma mater he struggled to pay for, noting that every American should have access to a college degree. It aimed to help those who couldn’t afford college pay for it, but the existence of the loans also shifted behavior, said Joel Best, a professor at the University of Delaware and the co-author of “The Student Loan Mess: How Good Intentions Created a Trillion-Dollar Problem”.

Student loans enable students to look at a wider range of schools, he said. “The schools start thinking that they don’t have to worry so much about tuition increases and state legislatures start shifting more of the burden on to students,” he said. “At the same time, there’s a massive increase in the number of people that are going to college.”

The number of students taking on debt has soared

All of that contributed to rising levels of student loan debt. Then in the early 1990s, Congress expanded access to the student loan program. The number of students taking on loans to attend college increased drastically and the public began to view student loans less as a vehicle for expanding access to higher education and more as a burden.

Roughly 70% of bachelor’s degree recipients graduate with student debt. In 1993, that share was just 47%, according to the Institute for College Access and Success, an advocacy group focused on equity in higher education.

And the amount students borrowed has soared over the last five decades. Students borrowed $120.1 billion in the 2010-2011 academic year versus $52.4 billion during the 2000-2001 academic year (adjusted for inflation) and $7.6 billion a year in the 1970s and according to data from the College Board.

“It was intended to be a last resort financing mechanism for people who didn’t have savings or who couldn’t get favorable loan terms from a bank,” Huelsman said of the student loan program. “The situation we find ourselves in now, where debt is pretty much a guarantee for most students, was not the intention of the original financing program.”

Parents are shouldering the student loan burden too

Students aren’t the only ones increasingly relying on student loans. During the 2011-2012 academic year, borrowers with Parent PLUS loans, the loan product parents can use to help finance their kids’ education, made up nearly 20% of all federal student loan borrowers, from just 4.1% during the 1989-1999 academic year, according to NerdWallet, a personal finance site.

What’s worse, today’s college graduates — and their parents — may struggle to find work that pays enough to make the debts manageable, said John Thelin, a professor at the University of Kentucky and the author of “A History of American Higher Education.” “That’s what’s gumming up the works.”

Students today no longer believe that their degrees will get them a well-paid job out of college, said Dan Clark, who graduated from Rutgers in 2010. That’s a very different world to when his parents graduated from the same college in the 1970s. “Nobody is counting on getting a job right out of school where you’re going to be able to completely support yourself,” Clark said. He’s currently pursuing a doctorate in ecology at Rutgers.

While in school, Clark worked a slew of summer jobs ranging from summer camp counselor to state park maintenance worker. He didn’t need to rely on his earnings from those jobs to pay for school. His dad works at Rutgers so he got a deal on tuition and used scholarship money to largely make up for the rest.

He was one of the lucky ones. Those summer jobs wouldn’t have made much of a dent in his bill. Clark said he probably earned $5,500 maximum a summer from that work. Rutgers in-state tuition and fees during the 2009-2010 academic year was more than $11,000. “Unless you really managed to find something very good for a summer job, there’s no way,” he said.

Clark said his parents had a very different experience. Though they both got some help from their parents paying for school, they were able to foot much of the bill themselves through work in the dining hall and odd retail jobs. His father reminisces about how cheap college was back then.

“His term bill was $250 with fees for the year,” he said.