“Everybody knows” that student debt loads are spiralling out of control, that the incidence of debt is growing at an alarming rate and that debt loads are unsustainable. Student debt forgiveness has played a major role in the Occupy movement in the United States, where student debt doubled in the last decade and now exceeds credit card debt. If reports are to be believed, we are in the midst of a student loan crisis.

Scratch the surface a little and you’ll see that the situation in Canada is hardly like that in the U.S. According to the most recent data on student debt, which unfortunately dates from the Canadian University Survey Consortium’s 2009 Graduating Student Survey, debt increased at a relatively small pace between 2000 and 2009, from just under $25,000 in 2000 to just under $27,000 in 2009 – 9% after inflation. No small amount to be sure, but keep in mind that tuition grew at a faster pace, by 14%, according to Statistics Canada during the same time period. Moreover, the proportion of undergraduates reporting debt increased by a mere two percentage points, from 56% to 58%.

While, in fact, student grant and loan remission programs are holding the line on debt, there remain concerns about the long-term manageability of debt loads; we’ve never really had a strong measure of the impact of student debt on a graduate’s financial decisions.

How much debt can students reasonably afford to take on in pursuit of post-secondary education? In a neat little paper for the College Board, Carleton’s Saul Schwartz and Skidmore College’s Sandy Baum, who combined have studied the issue of student debt from every conceivable angle, attempt to define benchmarks for student debt affordability (the pair worked on a Canadian version reaching similar conclusions). They conclude that what really matters isn’t the debt load, per se, but the proportion of income a graduate must devote to student loan repayment. They argue for a sliding scale of repayment, ranging from no payments for those earning $10,000 or less to a maximum of 18% of discretionary income (i.e., that which exceeds 150% of the poverty line) for those earning $150,000. Sound familiar? That’s because it served as the rationale for the parameters of the Repayment Assistance Plan administered by the Canada Student Loans Program and its provincial counterparts, which caps maximum payments at 20% of income and allows students to discharge outstanding debt after 15 years of repayment.

Coming off of a decade where student aid programs kept debt increases below the rise in tuition, Canadian students who do struggle after graduation have access to comprehensive repayment assistance. And yet, access to higher education remains titled in favour of those from wealthy, highly educated backgrounds. Tweaking student aid or adjusting the net cost of higher education is unlikely to produce huge gains in access; it will take serious efforts to address the academic, informational, cultural, motivational and aspirational barriers to higher education. Unfortunately, that’s a lot to fit on a placard.

A longer version of this article is included in the recent edition of Educated Solutions, put out by the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance.