This implies several things immediately:
- You have to take a job which can make payments on the debt.
- You have to choose stable jobs which will not suddenly fold under you.
There's also a somewhat hard to define aspect to the problem where you have to ensure that your local system is fiscally stable.
Anyway, non-1% Americans graduated from college not taking risks in their first 10 years out? Totally predictable, just from the debt perspective.
Then, at 32, 34, a lot of people are married and/or have a kid on the way. Welp, there's your high levels of downside again.
Add in to all this the fact that housing prices are effectively tethered to the availability of cash provided to the "highly paid" market (inequality increases)....
... so if your startup fails, you'll lose your place to live, and remote jobs are very rare, so you're in trouble in the big city with now-unaffordable costs of living.
the solution, in part, has a simple policy component: declare jubilee on all federally-originated student debt; free college for all students who maintain adequate gpas, no more federal loans. impose cost controls on universities that take federal money.
that effectively derisks an entire generation and opens up new options.
housing costs are less directly tractable and more politically problematic: the effective solution is to federally strip single family zoning from all land, and mandating density minimums and other supply-increasing zoning. (I assure you, the housing market is an interstate commerce system. :) ). But that only staunches the wound, it doesn't bring down housing prices into line with the median American's income.
Wait, this is about startups? Ha! No. That's a third order consequence caused by increasing early-career & mid-career risk, which in turn is increased by the planning & zoning codes and governmental defunding of education.