Bryan Madison, of Cumberland, says that if he had known he would have incurred $103,000 in debt — from private and federal sources — at Curry College, in Milton, Mass., he would have gotten a full-time day job and gone to school at night instead.

The Providence Journal / Glenn Osmundson

Behind the pomp and circumstance of college graduations this season is a pile of debt.

Loans to pay for college have grown rapidly in recent years as college prices have risen, family incomes have stagnated, and aid from grants has failed to keep pace to fill the resulting gap, according to a recent report by the College Board, a nonprofit association of colleges and universities nationwide.

More than two-thirds of students now borrow to help pay for college, according to a study issued last year by a federation of public interest research groups known as U.S. PIRG.

The average debt per student borrower is more than $22,000, according to the College Board, citing the 2006-2007 school year, the latest period for which figures are available.

Although a college diploma typically translates into higher lifetime earnings, graduates who face a mound of debt may have to postpone buying a house, marrying or starting a family, U.S. PIRG says.

And debt can result in lifestyle changes. Students saddled with college loans often must move back home after graduating, said Mark Higgins, dean of the University of Rhode Island’s College of Business Administration.

“They live at home so they can start paying back their loans,” Higgins said. The debt burden “restricts what they can do,” he said.

BRYAN D. MADISON, 25, works as an inside sales representative for a technology sales company in Lincoln.

He would like to make plans with his girlfriend — maybe buy a house and settle down at some point — but he cannot, he said.

After graduating from college in December 2006, he was left with a combined balance of more than $103,000 in private and federally backed student loans.

Now, more than half of his take-home pay goes toward principal and interest payments, which total more than $1,000 a month, he said.

Madison said he expects to be making payments on his college debt for the next 30 years. “I’ll be 55 years old when I’m done paying this,” he said.

So he lives at his parents’ home in Cumberland, watches his pennies, and waits. “There’s no way I can advance in my life unless I hit the lottery,” he said. “No way.”

MADISON’S LOAN balance is at the high end for students who graduate with a bachelor’s degree, said David DeBlois, director of the College Planning Center of Rhode Island.

“But it’s not unheard of,” especially for students graduating from private colleges and universities, said DeBlois, whose organization provides counseling, at no charge, to students and their families on college admissions and financial aid applications.

And the sum is “not atypical” for students who graduate with an advanced degree, said DeBlois, a former college financial aid officer.

Charles P. Kelley, executive director of the Rhode Island Student Loan Authority, a nonprofit agency based in Warwick that provides education loans for students and families, said, “Kids and parents are borrowing too much money,”

When times were booming, “People didn’t worry” much about college loans,” Kelley said.

But it does not take long for such debts to add up, and making payments can be a struggle — especially amid the recession, Kelley said.

AT THE UNIVERSITY of Rhode Island campus in South Kingstown, about 400 or so undergraduates are to receive their diplomas on Sunday from URI’s College of Business Administration.

About two-thirds have student loans, Higgins estimated.

Of those, the “vast majority” will have loan balances between $25,000 and $35,000; about 10 percent will have balances of between $60,000 and $70,000, he said.

And those figures are for a public school. Students at private colleges and universities — where tuition, fees and other expenses are typically higher — generally have larger loan balances upon graduation, he said.

“It surprises me that people think they can take on that much debt and get themselves out of it,” Higgins said.

“I don’t think people realize that what they’ve created, in essence, is a home mortgage,” with a stream of required monthly payments that could stretch across decades, he said.

College students “tend to live in the moment, so they don’t realize what they’ve done,” Higgins said.

And part of the problem is that the loan repayments typically are not required when the student is still in school. “It’s kind of like, ‘Out of sight, out of mind’,” he said.

Higgins believes that, before the recession ends, two things will happen: a shake-out in the commercial real estate sector, and an increase in defaults on loans for higher education.

“If you get up to 10 percent unemployment, you’ve got to believe that some of them” are debt-strapped students who will default on their loans, Higgins said.

The problem may not rise to the level of mortgage defaults in the housing sector, he said, “But it’s definitely going to be something that will have an impact.”

ABOUT SIX MONTHS after graduating from Mount Saint Charles Academy in Woonsocket in 2002, Bryan Madison enrolled at Curry College, in Milton, Mass.

“Curry was a good fit for me,” Madison recalled. He said he studied business management there, made the dean’s list, and had a 3.6 grade point average (out of a possible 4.0).

And it was Curry that gave him the chance to realize a long-held goal: playing hockey at the college level.

But it came at a cost.

Like many other private colleges and universities, particularly in the Northeast, Curry charges more than $40,000 a year for tuition, fees, room and board.

To help pay for such expenses, Madison received what he described as “a good chunk” of financial aid from Curry.

He also earned money from on-campus jobs, worked summers, and won an internship with a real-estate management firm.

It was not enough.

Because his parents were unable to help pay his education expenses, Madison said, he turned to loans to help bridge the gap, loans for which he alone is legally obligated.

Some of the loans were federally subsidized; repayment was not required until after graduation, and the federal government covered the interest charges in the meantime.

But other loans were from private issuers. Although he did not have to make payments on them while he was in school, the interest clock kept ticking all the while, adding to the balance.

Today, he owes about $17,600 on the federally backed student loans. The average annualized interest rate is about 4.73 percent, the monthly payment about $191.

He also owes about $85,000 in private education loans. The annualized interest rate, initially 12 percent, is now 9.75 percent. The monthly payment is about $821.

Madison said he was not prepared for the debt burden that greeted him upon graduating, especially the high interest rate and big balance on his private education loans.

He has tried repeatedly to renegotiate terms of debt with his lender — SLM Corp., of Reston, Va., commonly known as Sallie Mae — but has had no luck, he said.

Besides, his inquiries are answered by a call center in India, and his efforts are undermined by a language barrier, he said.

In addition, the lender has repeatedly applied his monthly payments incorrectly to interest instead of principal, he said.

“Every time I make a payment [now], I have to call them to make sure they apply it” in the right way, he said. “It’s a constant battle with them.”

(A spokeswoman for Sallie Mae declined to comment about Madison’s account, citing the company’s privacy policy. But she said, “We are disappointed whenever we hear from even one customer that the customer service experience fell short of our high standards.” She also said the company plans on “reaching out to Mr. Madison directly to see how we can help him.”)

Madison said he has tried other lenders, but none is willing to refinance his debt.

He has written to members of Congress, run dozens of searches on the Internet, but still cannot find a solution.

“I’ve tried everything,” Madison said after work one recent night at a coffee shop in Smithfield. “I’m not looking for charity. I’m looking for help, and some guidance to this,” he said. “I would do anything to get this off my back, just to settle this somehow.”

A COMPLICATING factor is private, non-federal student lending, which has grown significantly over the last decade and now accounts for about a quarter of all educational borrowing, according to a coalition of colleges, universities and consumer groups. Such loans typically carry high interest rates and high fees, and can pose other problems for borrowers — including inflexibility when it comes to refinancing, said Deanne Loonin, director of the Student Loan Borrower Assistance Project, a program of the National Consumer Law Center in Boston.

The industry has since run into trouble, she said. Nevertheless, “There are countless borrowers stuck with loans that they have no hope of repaying,” Loonin wrote in a report on the industry issued in April.

Higgins, at URI, put it this way: “There are no checks and balances” involving student loans. “They’ll give you the loans. They assume you’ll find a way to pay it back,” he said.

Madison said that, through his borrowings and other means, “I got an education . . . . It opened up a lot of doors for me.”

But had he known that he would face such a debt, he would not have enrolled, he said. Instead, he would have worked a full-time job days, and gone to school nights — perhaps at an in-state public college or university.

His parents cannot bail him out. “They have bills of their own,” Madison said. Besides, he said, “I don’t take handouts from anybody.”

So he faces a seemingly endless stream of monthly loan payments, his options limited.

Meanwhile, he said he occasionally plays the PowerBall lottery game, hoping for a jackpot.

His next monthly loan payment — about $1,012 — is due Sunday.

ndowning@projo.com