I graduated in 1977 with $10k + student loan. My first job paid $11400 a year. That was normal for the time. Your loan was about 1 years starting salary.
One has to wonder about the wisdom of paying 100s of thousands of dollars to learn to do a job paying $15 an hour.
This touches on the fact that some college majors just don’t lead to job and career fields in the job market. People should choose college majors wisely.
It is a matter of expectations. When you graduated college with an engineering degree, say, and expected about a years salary for student loans, your expectations were about right. Today, when a recent college graduate with gender studies and victimology degree graduates with a $150,000 student loan debt, they are looking at five years of gross pay at their $15.00 an hour job at Starbucks. They expected someone to offer them about $125K annually for the skills they obtained getting their degree. So they look at their paychecks and how much they are laden with debt and (true to their victimology training) say, “Poor me! I have it so bad!” Mom or Dad should have straightened them out on the demand for majors in Hispanic balladry and the expected pay for such people. But, if it happened, it did not sink in.