ADA, Ohio — Kelsey Griffith graduates today from Ohio Northern University. To start paying off her $120,000 in student debt, she is already working two restaurant jobs and will soon give up her apartment here to live with her parents. Her mother, who co-signed on the loans, is taking out a life insurance policy on her daughter.

“If anything ever happened, God forbid, that is my debt also,” said Griffith’s mother, Marlene Griffith.

With more than $1 trillion in student loans outstanding in this country, crippling debt is no longer confined to dropouts from for-profit colleges or graduate students who owe on many years of education, some of the overextended debtors in years past. Now nearly everyone pursuing a bachelor’s degree is borrowing, and as prices soar, a degree often comes with an enormous financial burden.

Griffith, 23, wouldn’t seem a perfect financial fit for a college that costs nearly $50,000 a year. Her father, a paramedic, and mother, a preschool teacher, have modest incomes, and she has four sisters. But when she visited Ohio Northern, she was won over by admissions staff and faculty members who urge students to pursue their dreams rather than obsess about the sticker price. “As an 18-year-old, it sounded like a good fit to me, and the school really sold it,” said Griffith, a marketing major. “I knew a private school would cost a lot of money. But when I graduate, I’m going to owe like $900 a month. No one told me that.”

Ninety-four percent of students who earn a bachelor’s degree borrow to pay for higher education — up from 45 percent in 1993, according to an analysis by The New York Times of the latest data from the Department of Education. This includes loans from the federal government, private lenders and relatives.

For all borrowers, the average debt in 2011 was $23,300, with 10 percent owing more than $54,000 and 3 percent more than $100,000, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reports. Average debt for bachelor degree graduates who took out loans ranges from under $10,000 at elite schools like Princeton and Williams College, which have plenty of wealthy students and enormous endowments, to nearly $50,000 at some private colleges with less affluent students and less financial aid.

Here at Ohio Northern, recent graduates with bachelor’s degrees are among the most indebted of any college in the country, and statewide, graduates of Ohio’s more than 200 colleges and universities carry some of the highest average debt in the country, according to data reported by the colleges and compiled by an educational advocacy group. The current balance of federal student loans nationwide is $902 billion, with an additional $140 billion or so in private student loans.

“If one is not thinking about where this is headed over the next two or three years, you are just completely missing the warning signs,” said Rajeev Date, deputy director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the U.S. agency created after the financial crisis.

The new loan crisis?

Date likened excessive student borrowing to risky mortgages. And as with the housing bubble before the economic collapse, the extraordinary growth in student loans has caught many by surprise. But its roots are in fact deep, and the cast of contributing characters — including college marketing officers, state lawmakers wielding a budget ax and wide-eyed students and families — has been enabled by a basic economic dynamic: an insatiable demand for a college education, at almost any price, and plenty of easy-to-secure loans, primarily from the federal government.

Much like the mortgage brokers who promised pain-free borrowing to homeowners just a few years back, many colleges don’t offer warnings about student debt in the glossy brochures and pitch letters mailed to prospective students. Instead, reading from the same handbook as for-profit colleges, they urge students not to worry about the costs. That’s because most students don’t pay full price.

Even discounted, the price is beyond the means of many. Yet too often, students and their parents listen without question.

“I readily admit it,” said Gordon Gee, the president of Ohio State University, who has also served as president of Vanderbilt and Brown, among others. “I didn’t think a lot about costs. I do not think we have given significant thought to the impact of college costs on families.”

‘Nothing is free’

Christina Hagan is an Ohio lawmaker who says students need to understand that attending college is not an entitlement. Last year, the Republican was appointed to fill a seat once occupied by her father in the Ohio House.

Hagan is also a 23-year-old college student.

She will graduate shortly from Malone University, an evangelical college, with more than $65,000 in student debt. Though she makes $60,000 a year as a state representative, she plans to begin waiting tables in the next few weeks at a Mexican restaurant to help pay down her student loans and credit cards. She pays about $1,000 a month.

“I placed a priority on a Christian education, and I didn’t think about the debt,” said Hagan, who says she takes responsibility for her debt. “I need my generation to understand that nothing is free.”

While Hagan’s perspective is unusually personal, it is a common view among lawmakers here in Ohio and many states. From 2001 to 2011, state and local financing per student declined by 24 percent nationally. Over the same period, tuition and fees at state schools increased 72 percent, compared with 29 percent for nonprofit private institutions, according to the College Board. Many of the cuts were the result of a sluggish economy that reduced tax revenue, but the sharp drop in per-student spending also reflects a change: An increasing number of lawmakers voted to transfer more of the financial burden of college from taxpayers to students and their families. (Local funding is a small percentage of the total, and mostly goes to community colleges.)

“To say that tuition goes up because the state doesn’t pay enough money, well, that is the taxpayers’ money,” said Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a Republican elected in 2010 whose budget included cuts to higher education because of the end of federal stimulus money.

Donald Heller, an expert on higher education, said elected officials in both parties had figured out that colleges were one of the few parts of state government that could raise money on their own. If lawmakers cut state financing, the schools could make it up by raising tuition. “It lets legislators off the hook and makes universities look like the bad guy,” said Heller, dean of the College of Education at Michigan State University.

If any state is representative of the role government has played in the growth of student debt, Ohio makes a good candidate. While other states have made steeper cuts in recent years because of the recession, Ohio has been chipping away at it far longer. It now ranks sixth from the bottom in financing per student, at $4,480.

In the late 1970s, higher education in Ohio accounted for 17 percent of the state’s expenditures. Now it is 11 percent. By contrast, prisons were 4 percent of the state’s budget in the late 1970s; now they account for 8 percent. Federal mandates and court orders have compelled lawmakers to spend more money on Medicaid and primary education, too. Legislators could designate a greater percentage of the budget to higher education by raising taxes, but there is no appetite for that. Kasich has signed a pledge not to raise taxes, as have about two dozen legislators.

Some elected officials say state colleges and universities have brought the debt problem upon themselves.

They suggest, for example, that state schools are bloated, antiquated and don’t do a good enough job graduating students or training them for the workforce. Some complain about the salaries of football coaches and college presidents, like Gee, who makes $2 million a year as president of Ohio State. Kasich questions why all state universities need to offer every major, like journalism or engineering, instead of parceling those programs among the schools.

“It’s not just inefficiencies,” said the governor, an Ohio State graduate. “It’s, ‘I want to be the best in this.’ It’s duplication of resources. It’s a sweeping change that is needed across academia.”

The shadow of for-profits

Wanda McGill has stopped opening her student loan bills.

She isn’t sure how much debt she has accumulated, though she thinks it’s about $100,000. But McGill, a 38-year-old single mother, knows for sure she cannot pay it.

McGill said she dropped out of DeVry University, a for-profit college with a branch in Columbus, two years ago after she ran out of money — even with the loans. She now makes $8.50 an hour working for an employment training center in Florida.

“I was promised the world and was given a garbage dump to clean up,” she wrote in a complaint at consumeraffairs.com.

The student loan crisis has spread from for-profit colleges to more traditional institutions, but the for-profit colleges continue to represent the worst of the problem. Students complain that they were misled about the costs of education and that their job prospects were exaggerated. Government reports and lawsuits have accused some for-profit colleges of outright fraud, including doctoring attendance records or peddling near-worthless degrees.

The result? Students at for-profit colleges are twice as likely as other students to default on their loans. Moreover, among students seeking a bachelor’s degree, only 22 percent succeed within six years, compared with 65 percent at nonprofit private schools and 55 percent at public institutions. (For-profit students, however, tend to do better at obtaining associate degrees and certificates.)

Leaders of the for-profit industry defended themselves, saying they were providing higher education for lower-class students whom traditional colleges had left behind. “The reality is the type of students we attract have no other opportunity,” said Steven Gunderson, head of a leading trade organization. “We are the ones that provide a path to the middle class.”

The Obama administration has tried to make college pricing easier to understand; as of last year, colleges were required to post calculators on their websites that explain the net price after grants and loans. But critics say they can be confusing, misleading or difficult to find. The administration also has proposed that colleges be required to offer a “shopping sheet” to make it easier for families to measure the true costs and benefits.

“We just have to get them much more information,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said. “If you’re going to college, you need to know not what the first year costs. You need to know what it’s going to cost for the long haul.”

Even with more information, students and their parents seem willing to pay the ever-escalating price of a college degree, which remains the key rung up the ladder of economic mobility.

“It scares the hell out of me,” Denise Entingh says of her expected $45,000 debt load. The 44-year-old signed on at the Hondros School of Nursing, a for-profit college. “But I think it will be all right. I’m not going to worry about it right now. I had to take that plunge.”