The data does not show the income of students' parents so it is not possible to draw conclusions about the backgrounds of heavy borrowers. The numbers do suggest, however, that worries that America is heading for a debt crisis over student loans are overblown.

"There's no bubble here," said Sandy Baum, a professor of higher education at George Washington University. "People who borrow a lot tend to end up with high paying jobs."

Take Baker Logan, who borrowed about $120,000 to get an engineering degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which data firm Payscale ranks as a top three school for long-term alumni earnings. The average mid-career MIT grad makes $128,800 a year.

"MIT has that name, so you immediately get that wow feature when you're talking to employers," Logan said. He graduated this year and is working at a consulting company in Woburn, Massachusetts. Logan, who asked that his current income not be disclosed, expects to pay off his 30-year student loan ahead of schedule.

The data also suggests that the more you study, the more you earn, even if it means building up much larger debts.

Last year, a young American household with student debt and a main breadwinner with four years of college owed $32,000 and earned about $61,000 on average.

The income is a third more than the earnings of a family with just a high school diploma.

And the rewards were even higher for young families that have a member who did graduate studies. They owed $55,000 but this came with an income of $99,000 on average.

Jason Delisle, an education policy expert at the New America Foundation in Washington, has analyzed government data and estimates that about 40 percent of current U.S. student loan balances were taken out to finance grad school. This, he says, should temper worries about the debt burden's wider impact.

"It's almost like the problem goes away," said Delisle, who used to be a senior analyst on the Republican staff of the U.S. Senate Budget Committee.