But what if the pent-up demand story is just no longer true? What if the combination of graduating with debt, difficult job prospects, and stagnant wages has created a new normal? What if college graduates simply expect to spend their first decades “in the real world” shackled with debt and struggling to get by? Without clearer data, we won’t know the truth. But there’s no question that the finances of college graduates are more strained now than at practically any point in our history. Forty million Americans start out their working lives with a massive debt burden, and the salary they can earn out of college—if they can get a job at all—simply isn’t enough to keep up. “The combination of more debt and lower incomes means more risk, and many young workers are walking on an economic tightrope,” said Rohit Chopra, student loan ombudsman for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, at a recent field hearing.

If the Great Delay persists, it will handicap millennials for decades to come. A student taking out $53,000 in debt will lose $208,000 over his lifetime, according to the think tank Demos, because he will be less able to build home equity or save for retirement early in his life. There are solutions. Giving debt-holders refinancing options, or moving to a more manageable repayment schedule based on income, would certainly help. So would making college affordable, if not free. And of course, a few more jobs would be nice. But if the student debt treadmill really is stunting the growth of the economy, those jobs may never materialize. And without action, we’ll have no answer for a generation of debt slaves.