The ​closest approximate weight of a trillion single dollar bills -- our famous cotton duplicates of George Washington packed together, crammed into 44,080 eighteen-wheelers trucking along with 25-ton carrying capacities -- is over 1 million tons.

Like currency, numbers will lose value when too much enters the table at one time. A “million” is impossible to mentally picture. A “billion” less so. The higher we go -- a trillion, a quadrillion, a quintillion, and so on -- the less anyone is actually able to understand. It takes the world’s largest squadron of imaginary eighteen-wheelers to hold our focus on what numbers that high might, but never will, look like. Simply put, we can’t ​see ​what a trillion dollars of debt looks like.

But we can feel it.

1.71 trillion dollars, that more than 1 million tons, is thinned out, diluted, spread over the United States, and pressed down on nearly 45 million people, who will, on average, spend twenty years of their lives relieving it. To find a career, begin a family, begin paying mortgages and monthly rents, to begin the slow process of growing old while only just finishing payments on an education that (hopefully) served them well enough two decades ago to keep them afloat now, is almost comical in an economically advanced society. Especially in a time when some Americans consider the value of a college degree at all, with online courses being so prevalent, run by professionals in the field of study or college professors themselves, generally cheaper and sometimes completely free.

Nonetheless, according to the ​Bureau of Labor Statistics​, a college degree still reigns in the most profit, with about as much as $1,000 average difference between the weekly earnings of those with professional or doctoral degrees and those with only high school diplomas. With that kind of incentive, it remains for high schools in the United States to push for high college preparedness standards. More than half of current high school graduates will be enrolled in college at some point before their mid-twenties, many of them entering the debt cycle before they’ve entered their own apartments.

Now that we know the numbers, we understand that they are drastically high. However, with a bit of research, a lot of time, and a whole heap of hoping, steps can be made by the people and by the government to lessen -- and perhaps one day exterminate -- the stress and consequences of college debt.

Because colleges, both public and private, offer a multitude of scholarships, and the government does much the same thing with financial grants, it is relatively easy for students today to find at

least some help with the unforgiving cost of a higher education. However, some suggest the government take a much larger step forward, offering drastically reduced, or free, tuition for students of public colleges. Part of President Joe Biden’s rumored ten year college relief plan, estimated to cost anywhere from $750 billion to more than $1 trillion, is to cancel out the cost of college for students in household families which produce less than an annual salary of $125,000. While there is as of yet no confirmed cost for this plan, nor a confirmed method of execution, the general idea is to tax the wealthy in greater amounts, and to maximize the middle class.

More radically, some have thrown out the idea of simply cancelling all student loan debt at once, for everyone, as proposed in ​this article from the Roosevelt Institute. Simply stopping the charge of the better part of two trillion dollars is no small feat, though the article claims that the overall macroeconomic impact will be positive, slightly reducing the unemployment rate and exporting stress from household balance sheets into the hands of the federal government.

Is it possible for the American people to trust the government enough to handle another trillion dollars of economic weight and responsibility? Sensible funding and a refresh of government spending priorities may offer a more optimistic answer.

Whether or not college should be completely free is theoretical. It’s an extreme change to centuries-old economic standards, with inherently problematic costs and retaliation by those affected, government officials and civilians alike. To say that it should or should not be so may be a rush to judgement -- to say that it should be scrutinized, examined, tested, and then adopted over the course of a generation or so, or however many it takes (Rome was not built in a day), is something worth discussing.

Most will agree, though, that changes must be made in the name of economic and social fruitfulness. Changes ​will be made. Who will make them, and when, and their effects, are not predetermined. For the future of American children, American workers, and the American economy, no amount of eighteen-wheelers is too many.

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