When I graduate from Pitt this April, I will owe a combined total of $53,638 in subsidized and unsubsidized Stafford, Parent Plus and private loans, not counting interest.

How much do you owe?

Rude as it might seem, this is a profoundly important question. Student debt is unquestionably one of the greatest challenges facing our generation. As we speak, Katie Couric’s show, “Katie,” is seeking interviewees for a student-debt special featuring responses to the query: “Are school loans ruining your life?” Scholars such as Carnegie Mellon’s Jeffrey Williams compared the excess of student-loan debt to colonial-era indentured servitude, where those in bondage pledge years of their own labor, handing over a significant chunk of their wages to their debtors in exchange for the promise of a brighter future in the New World.

In the past few years, graduates have defaulted on $67 billion worth of federal student loans, and lenders are taking harsher measures to get their money back, denying transcripts to alumni in default and hiring professional collectors to hound those who haven’t paid.

Chances are very good that someone reading this is going to end up in default themselves. Chances are even better that nearly everyone reading this has at least one friend who recently graduated from college and now gets upwards of 10 calls a day from collection agencies — even though those calls often veer into the territory of illegal harassment.

We often joke about the amount of student debt we’re in, but the jokes are dark. “Faking my own death seems like the most reasonable, legitimate, sane and intelligent thing to do when faced with the amount of loan debt I am currently in,” says a Facebook post by 2012 Pitt graduate Sam Keppenstein, who says her loan amount is “at least three times” the indebtedness rate of the $33,662 average amount listed on Pitt’s College Board page. She’s kidding about faking her death, but many student debtors are serious when we go on to matter-of-factly discuss the pros and cons of selling our eggs — or, to be more politically correct, “donating” them in exchange for time-and-trouble compensation that can range from $5,000 to $10,000.

Moreover, when we talk about student debt, we tend to be vague. Most of us say we have “a lot of loans,” but it’s rarely clear what that means — anything from $20,000 to $100,000 can be someone’s idea of “a lot of loans.”

Partly, that’s because the numbers can be hard to keep track of — at the end of the day, most of us are going to pay far more than we originally borrowed because on some payment plans, the interest on your loan can end up exceeding the principal. Before I looked up Pitt’s statistics and surveyed my peers, I was afraid to even think about my student loan amount. I was afraid I would discover it was far, far more than is normal and that I would find myself drowning in debt to an extent far greater than almost anybody I knew, with little to no hope of ever emerging.

Partly, it’s because talking about student debt means talking about class. The fact is, a student with tens of thousands of dollars in debt isn’t just going to be poorer than her classmate with no debt for a good while after she graduates; she was likely poorer to start out with. This doesn’t hold true in all cases — some people without means avoid loans because they received merit-based scholarships, and some people have parents who could afford to pay their college tuition but choose not to. But overall, the discussion about student debt is permeated by awkwardness about class, from the defensiveness of the kids with a lot of loans, to the guilt of the kids who were well-off enough to pay as they went.

But most of all, I think, we avoid talking numbers with regard to our student debt because we feel guilty and foolish. We worry that we are the idiot kids that old people in online comment sections rant about, stupidly getting degrees we can’t afford in subjects that won’t make us any money because we somehow believed that we were just too special to go to community college or go for an accounting degree.

But I don’t think that’s fair. I think many of us have done exactly what we were told we should. In high school, I remember college prep pamphlets saying that it was OK to take out lots of student loans, because people take out loans for things like cars and homes that don’t last as long ­— or contribute as much to your life satisfaction and earning potential — as a college degree should. And despite the pain and difficulty of the recession, a recent analysis of federal data shows that still holds true. Bachelor’s degree holders are still 4 percent more likely to be employed than associate’s degree holders and 9 percent more likely to be employed than those with only high school diplomas, and graduates of four-year institutions have seen their wages drop at half the rate of those without bachelor’s degrees.

I also question the wisdom that we should all get high-paying degrees to justify our college education. First of all, not everyone can or should be an investment banker. Most of the people we are taught to look up to throughout history ­— with the exception of scientists and politicians — aren’t people who chose high-paying careers. They’re activists and writers, people who made the world a better place and often went broke doing it.

We need teachers, social workers, journalists, historians and — yes, God forbid — artists. College students who rack up lots of debt pursuing “soft” liberal-arts degrees aren’t just studying what they love — they’re studying what they are good at. I’m not getting a writing degree because I selfishly put my own enjoyment of storytelling ahead of the tax revenue I could have contributed to society if I had gone into insurance; I’m getting a writing degree because I think the world needs a good writer more than it needs a bad insurance agent — and believe me, I would be a terrible insurance agent.

Instead of feeling guilty about the debt we’ve accumulated in pursuit of the American Dream, we need to have an honest conversation about the skyrocketing price of education, predatory lending and the other issues surrounding the student-debt crisis. But first, we need to be willing to talk numbers.

These are the amounts people (all Pitt students, unless otherwise indicated) confessed to me that they owe: $36,000 for four years with a nonfiction writing major; $50,000 for four years of undergrad and one year at the school of education; $48,000 for undergrad and a degree from the School of Public Health; $66,000 for undergraduate alone; $11,000 for three years of room and board for a student with a full-tuition scholarship; $11,000 for the first year before taking a break to save up; $100,000 for five years in the engineering program; $35,000 still owed by a Penn State graduate who graduated twelve years ago; $53,000 for a Pitt News columnist about to graduate into a world where “English major” is a punch line.

How much do you owe?

Write Tracey at [email protected]. Visit her blog at traceyhickey.wordpress.com.