Forget Free College. Here's How to Fix the Student Debt Crisis.

In this series, students and industry experts share stories and perspectives from inside the student debt crisis. Share yours here using #StudentDebt.

Twenty-one years ago this month, I graduated from Ithaca College. As the son of a schoolteacher and a teacher’s aide, I financed an education at the private college in upstate New York through a combination of work, scholarships, and student loans.

Like today’s students, when I was called to the bursar’s office each semester to sign my federal loan checks, I never considered what impact they might have on my life after college. Six months after graduation, my payment booklet arrived from Sallie Mae. My first payment was around $50.

Unlike current graduates, my debt was manageable on a journalist’s salary of $420 a week. This month, among those who financed college through loans, the average graduate left commencement day $33,000 in debt. Six months from now, those graduates will receive their first payment notice in the mail, on average for about $380, with 120 more monthly payments ahead of them.

When student debt accounts for 15% of a new graduate’s take-home salary it can have an impact on the career decisions someone makes when just starting out

That figure might not seem like much, but when it accounts for about 15 percent of an average new graduate’s take-home salary it can have an impact on the career decisions someone makes when just starting out. Salary—not fit, happiness, or career advancement—becomes the driving decision in choosing a job. Debt rules out unpaid internships that could lead to a top-notch job, for example, or living in pricey cities with dynamic labor markets that offer twenty-somethings many job options.

I met many of those recent graduates while reporting my new book, There Is Life After College. Student debt dictated their lives after college like they never imagined when they decided where to go to school four years earlier. Now they were stuck in dead-end jobs solely because they needed a steady paycheck to pay off their loans.

Many of them also gave up on their dreams of becoming an entrepreneur. Gallup has found that among those who graduated from college since 2006 with some debt, 1 in 5 young adults said they delayed starting a business because of their loans. For graduates who left college with more than $25,000 in loan debt, 1 in 4 said they decided to forgo their plans for a start-up.

This is why students and parents should consider how much debt they are willing to take on before they make their college choice. In doing so, remember that half of all colleges give freshmen bigger grants than they do sophomores, juniors, and seniors. In other words, the student loan you take on your first year is likely to be the smallest of your undergraduate career, especially because federal limits on loan amounts increase as you go through college (they are $5,500 for freshmen and $7,500 by the time you reach your junior year).

Debt is inevitable for most students. The federal government suggests that no more than 15 percent of your income should go toward paying off student-loan debt. Another rule of thumb: Your total undergraduate borrowing should be limited to what you might expect to make your first year after graduation.

The rising cost of a college education has, as usual, turned into the subject of intense discussions on the campaign trail for president this year. Sen. Bernie Sanders has fueled that debate with his proposal for free college, a proposal that will ultimately do little to change the cost of college in my opinion. 

If the next president really wants to fix the impact that college debt has on young adults, here are three fixes to get them started:.

Limit a student’s ability to borrow

Colleges should be able to limit how much students may borrow, perhaps based on major or tuition price. Without such caps, some students “cash out” at low-cost institutions and borrow well above the price of tuition.

Extend the timeframe for repayment

Even as the average loan amount has increased, the standard repayment term has remained at 10 years. The U.S. has one of the shortest repayment time periods in the world. Students in Sweden, for example, pay their loans back over 25 years.

Make loan limits consistent by year in school

How much students are allowed to borrow from the federal government differs by their year in school. The original goal of the varying limits was to have students access grants instead of loans as they were getting started in school before shifting the burden to upperclassmen as an incentive to finish their degree. The problem is that the loan limits haven’t kept pace with the rise in college prices, forcing students to turn to more expensive private loans to fill in the gap or their parents to take on loans of their own. 

Whether student loans have reached crisis proportions is still a matter of debate. It's important to remember that those eye-popping six-figure debt stories you read about are mostly young adults who also borrowed for graduate or professionals school. And 30 percent of students don't borrow anything for college. But that good statistics about student debt can quickly turn to bad new unless we change the worrisome trends about college costs and how students finance their education. 

Jeffrey Selingo is author of the new book, There Is Life After College. You can follow his writing here, on Twitter @jselingo, on Facebook, and sign up for free newsletters about the future of higher education at jeffselingo.com.

He is a regular contributor to the Washington Post’s Grade Point blog, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and a visiting scholar at Georgia Tech's Center for 21st Century Universities.