Will student debt cancel a generation of future home buyers?

Yes, college students chose to take on their loans. I admit that. However, they do so at a young age, usually, and may not have fully thought through the ramifications of going in debt to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, to earn a degree that often does not propel them into a career lucrative enough to pay back student loans. How will they enter the market as first-time home buyers when they are already saddled with a "mortgage"?

Some hard-working recent graduates notice that their less-focused friends who studied liberal arts, rather than engineering or accounting/business, are taking jobs with amusement parks and restaurants, while moving back home with parents. Of course loan repayment is deferred, which can double the loan's balance in a surprisingly short number of years.

My point is that higher education is overpriced. I attended the UC system in the mid-1980s, and paid about $1,200 per year for tuition. Tuition is now around $12,000 per year for the same school. Private schools can run up to $50,000 per year. This has way outpaced inflation. The cost of the education is even higher if you factor in 4+ years of lost wages while in school. Is there any way to get this under control?

Of course, there will always be some parent willing to foot the bill to send Sammy to an expensive college so that he can "find himself". He may graduate with a useless degree which only means he will have to ask his parents to finance another 4 years so that he can "really find himself". Then with a J.D. or a phd in hand, perhaps he will be mature enough to handle real work in the real world. Lucky kid with rich parents.

But for the rest of us, is it practical to rack up $200,000 in student loans in order to get a job that pays way less than the average $42,000 per year salary? How exactly is this practical? Should loan companies (er, now the government -- eyeroll) look at the earning potential of degrees before shoving huge piles of money at young adults who were children just the prior year? That is, if the graduate gets a job at all, and youth unemployment is much higher than average, some say over 50%.