It's a totally bonkers assumption. If it was true, it seems to support a slightly different version of the same point. A 45 year loan on education doesn't seem like the result of a successful system.

Well my n is small. Tenured faculty at Stanford, still paying after 30 y and unlikely to pay off in next decade (note: not in CS, Economics, or business which pay the big bucks). Have heard other faculty discuss this at dinner parties too.

I graduated 35 years ago and back then was able to pay my MIT tuition by consulting over the summer + January. CS of course during the AI boom. Doubt that’s possible today.

I think the financing of education in the US is absurd and broken, but there is some logic to spreading the financing of an asset over the lifetime of the asset.

I'd estimate that the lifetime of a house is generally longer than the "useful lifetime" of an education. House financing, as far as I've seen, rarely exceeds 30 years. There are probably outliers, just like in education financing.