I'll throw some benefits of the doubt out to our financial system and culture around the necessity of going to college to survive and admit that it took me three tries to finish university. That said, I eventually stumbled on a high salary with a few years where the salary was akin to Monty Python absurdism. I divorced two years ago and began aggressively paying down my student loans.
As I mentioned, it took me three tries to finish college due to having a rather inconsistent brain (I functioned well sometimes, while at others, I encountered, as I believe they now call them, “full-blown” tonic-clonic seizures. It was a minor inconvenience, of course, but I failed two state universities before graduating from a prestigious university.
Essentially, using student loans to fail two state schools and then using student loans to finish a very expensive private school left me over $130k in student loans. My decision to finish school landed me a great job to the point where paying off student loans isn't such an enormous imposition and has led to a much better life for me. Here's the part that makes me insane, and I wonder if this is common knowledge that I missed from being a first-generation college student or if I was temporarily shaking on the floor when it was brought up.
I applied the same advice given to paying down credit cards: pay off the highest-interest credit cards first, then work your way down to spend the least amount paying down the initial loan. Credit Bureaus consider credit cards more or less as lines of credit, but student loans are seen as installment loans. Commonly, for each semester a student needs a loan, they receive both a subsidized and unsubsidized loan. Unless my math courses were poorer than I thought, that means 16 installment loans throughout undergrad.
Finally, the point. If you have a credit card with a $100k limit and pay it down lower than 10%, your credit score will improve significantly. If you pay off the most expensive student loans first, working sequentially through the less and less expensive loans, something very different happens. Imagine you have 10 student loans for an amount of $10k each. You pay the first of the highest-interest loans for many good reasons, but when you are excited to check your credit score, you find your score has dropped significantly. You haven't paid half off a $100k loan; instead, you appear to owe $49,000 on a $50,000 loan, as if those previous loans just disappeared. Unless you have a high income, buying a car is now more difficult, and buying a house is even more difficult, not that it was ever easy.
Since I am looking for a house shortly but have not gotten to the point where I would have been royally screwed, I thought this might be useful for some. I chose to take $10k from my savings for the down payment and proportionally pay down all of my loans to get over the 50% repayment mark and pay off in the incredibly murky markets of real estate and insurance.
Of course, there's always the possibility I'm a hick and never noticed any of the flagrant hints as to how this would work.