Sara Garside Ellis could buy a Mercedes sports car with $130,000.

Or a vacation condo.

Or, maybe more important to the physics teacher, a home.

But $130,000 is how much Ellis still owes for a degree from Juniata College, a private liberal arts school, and the master’s degree she earned to qualify to teach high school.

An unwitting victim of school funding cuts, Ellis left Pennsylvania because she couldn’t land a job in classroom. Instead she lives in Maryland, where she works in a poverty stricken district in a job that qualifies her for $17,500 in loan forgiveness after five years.

To take advantage of the program, she cannot consolidate her loans. That forces her to pay about $1,000 a month toward her student loan debt – or about the same amount she expects to pay on a mortgage once she and her husband buy a house.

Things would be different had Ellis, 25, not left Pennsylvania.

“I know that if I would have stayed in Pennsylvania, most likely I would have lived at home for quite a while after graduating simply due to the enormity of my student loan debt,” she said. “It is actually becoming more normal for students to move back home after graduation in order to save up money and to pay off their loans.”

Ellis’ situation reflects a new normal for millennials saddled with mounds of student-loan debt, according to economists and consumer advocates.

Americans are adding college loans faster than debt in any other category – including credit cards and car loans, according to the Federal Reserve.

As numbers get bigger for monthly payments, grads chained to those obligations are entering the workforce under far more pressure to pay than previous generations.

At a bare minimum, experts say, students should land jobs that pay them a salary that matches the total debt they’re carrying after school.

That’s a tall order for English and political science majors, and maybe it’s no surprise that the number of students in default is rising.

Side effects

The debt load isn’t just borne by students anymore. More parents, grandparents and other relatives are helping cover the cost of college by taking on debt themselves – a trend that some say is depleting savings and delaying retirements.

The country’s collective college debt skyrocketed from $516 billion eight years ago to more than $1 trillion in 2013, according to the Office of Federal Student Aid, and the borrowing is having other effects.

Among them is the number of students who linger at home with mom and dad long after they’ve put away their graduation caps and gowns.

Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York point to a clear link between student debt and a trend in which twenty-somethings stay home. Every increase of $10,000 in student debt, they find, translates into a 5.3 percent increase in the chances that a former student doesn’t leave the nest.

It’s not the only side effect of mounting loans. Even families that don’t assume debts on behalf of their children are literally putting themselves on the line by agreeing to cover repayment should their students default.

The weight of student debt is squeezing home ownership, too.

For years, first-time homebuyers represented about 4 in 10 home purchases.

Now, according to the Fed, it’s more like 3 in 10 – a shift that economists attribute to the spreading impact of college loans.

Historically 30-year-olds with student debt had higher rates of homeownership because they generally had better-paying jobs, according to the Fed.

Now, for the first time in at least a decade, they’re less likely to own homes than their peers with no student debt.

‘Just doesn’t work’

You don’t need to tell all of this to Kayla Sanders, of Johnstown, Pa. She and her husband pay $650 a month to companies that hold their student debts, worth a combined $50,000.

With that much of their take-home pay going toward loans, the couple still rent their home. If not for their debt load, Sanders said they could probably buy.

Sanders and her husband both started college at St. Francis University in nearby Loretto. Once they were enrolled, they realized they couldn’t afford it and transferred.

He went to a local business school to study accounting, and she went to a community college where she majored in early childhood education. Since graduating two and three years ago, neither has landed a job connected to their areas of study.

Sanders, a nursing assistant, said she wonders if she was sold a bill of goods by university officials who indoctrinate students with the idea that a college degree is a ticket to prosperity.

“I feel like you are pressed to go to college because you will get a job – and it just doesn’t work,” she said.

As aggravating as their situation is, Sanders and her husband are better off than many of their peers.

A study by the Education Policy Center in 2012 found that 1 in 3 students who take loans leave college without any degree at all.

Expanding costs

The crush of student debt traces to the early 1990s, and it has only accelerated since then.

The average student loan debt was just under $10,000 in the early ’90s. A decade later, it jumped to $17,500.

Students who leave college in debt now carry an average of $35,000 in loan obligations, according to Edvisors.com, a financial aid information web site.

And it’s not just that students are carrying more debt. A larger number of them are leveraged, as well.

Twenty years ago, about half of all college graduates had debt. Now close to three-quarters of students take on loans.

The reasons are simple enough: More students are going to college. Students are taking longer to graduate.

And the cost of college is going through the roof.

In 2000-01, the sticker price of a public university for in-state students averaged about $11,500 a year, according to the College Board. That has since doubled.

The average cost of a private college now tops $45,000 a year.

Researchers at Demos, a left-leaning think tank, tie the escalation to diminished government support.

Tuition hikes make up funding gaps, which shifts cost increases onto students.

Pennsylvania could be considered Ground Zero for what’s being described by some consumer advocates as a national crisis.

The state’s premier public schools, the University of Pittsburgh and Penn State, are the two most expensive public universities in the country, according to the U.S. Department of Education College Affordability and Transparency Center.

The annual cost of attending Pitt for a Pennsylvania student in most undergraduate programs is $29,728. At Penn State it’s $30,740.

The average debt of Pennsylvania students – including those in private and public colleges – is more than $32,000 after four years. For those who attend Pitt and Penn State, it’s closer to $36,000.

Long-term consequences

Those numbers are causing high school students and their parents to pause.

A survey by lender Sallie Mae found that over the past five years, the percentage of students attending private universities has held steady at about 25 percent.

But the survey found a shift in the remaining three-quarters of students: Fewer are opting to attend four-year public colleges and instead are enrolling in community colleges.

“A lot of people want to go to community college – even students graduating from private high schools – because of the cost,” said Jeff Woodard, executive director of the College Access Program in Pittsburgh.

At Penn State and Pitt, school leaders are finding new ways to emphasize that short-term decisions about college have long-term consequences.

“The most expensive increase is to go a fifth year,” said Penn State President Eric Barron of students who stretch what are traditionally four-year programs. The cost is even more onerous, he added, for those who linger and leave without graduating.

Penn State is exploring ways to help more students graduate on time, he said.

A pilot program allows 150 first-year students to earn six course credits in the summer before their freshman year. Those students also get to take 12 credits – nearly a whole semester’s worth – during the summer between their freshman and sophomore years.

At the same time, students get part-time jobs over the break, so they are better prepared to handle living costs.

“The idea is to help so they don’t get behind,” Barron said. “You put your foot on the gas and get your degree as fast as you can.”

Issues of college affordability and student debt are now a national conversation, said Patrick Gallagher, chancellor at the University of Pittsburgh.

Colleges can’t control all factors affecting what consumer advocates are calling a crisis, he said, but they can help their students succeed.

“What we have to do is make sure the value is there,” he said, “and make it so students can make decisions and graduate in a timely way with a high quality degree, and they are getting jobs.”

John Finnerty covers the Pennsylvania Statehouse for CNHI’s newspapers and websites. Reach him at jfinnerty@cnhi.com