Households with at least one advanced degree carried 51% of overall student-loan debt in 2016.

More students are attending and completing graduate school, but as master's degrees become more expensive, they're also borrowing more.

Graduate students can more easily pay off loans because they tend to get high-paying jobs. Sometimes, though, those high-paying jobs earn less than the debt the borrower accumulated.

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At $1.5 trillion, the nation's student-loan debt is at an all-time high.

The climbing cost of undergraduate school often bares the brunt of the blame, but graduate school is also a key player in the student-debt crisis.

More students are attending graduate school than they did a decade ago. This has led the amount of government debt shouldered by grad students to increase from 32% in 2002 to 40% today, according to NPR.

What's more, households with at least one advanced degree carried over half (51%) of overall student debt in 2016, according to "Inequality and Opportunity in a Perfect Storm of Graduate Student Debt," a paper by the Wisconsin Center for Education and Research.

Read more: 10 mind-blowing facts that show just how dire the student-loan crisis in America is

"We already know that the economic returns to graduate and professional degrees have been rising at a faster rate than returns to undergraduate degrees," wrote Jaymes Pyne, co-author of the paper. "Combine increasing returns and increasing enrollments with a policy environment that views advanced degrees as a private rather than a public good, and you get more debt."

Here's how the nation's ongoing student loan crisis has affected graduate students.