the debt comes from my personal number which as I said may not be representative of him, but as I know many people who have debt in that range from undergrad it is possible.
two assuming interest is compounded anually (which will lead to an underestimate) 70k turns into 80k over the two years. plus the additional 50k that someone else said would be incurred by paying for your own time at nyu masters. leaves you with 130k. at an 8 percent interest (which is usually just below the prime rate, although the rate has been dropping this year and will rise again next year) that 130k will incur 10k worth of interest every year, after checking the websites of a couple of public grad schools, I found that a teaching assistant gets an $8000 stipend and a research assistant makes $16000 (taken from the department statistics of uc irvine, and umass amherst) assuming you get the 16k figure and don't have to pay for housing with that, you could start making payments on the debt while a phd student, but again that's a pretty optimal scenario.
assuming that you only put in the interest during that time, you would graduate from your phd with 130k of debt.
from the aip statistics a post-doc position makes 40k on average. taxes in america are about 30%, so when you graduate assuming you are good and get a postdoc straight away you will have 30k to spend for a year, making debt payments on the order of 15k a year as to pay off your debt in a reasonable amount of time, cheap student housing along with cheap food in the amherst, MA area will total up to about 8k a year car insurance is about 1.5k a year, and if you want to drive a good car that you won't have to worry about fixing will leave you with 5k worth of payments every year (numbers taken from friends parents who have good credit and driving records).
granted you could save some money here and there by getting a dirt cheap used car and expecting a thousand dollars or so of mechanic work every year, thus saving 4k. but never the less you will be incredibly cash strapped for the first 5 years out of grad school, and you won't be able to afford a house or a good sized apartment for at least 10 years.
not to mention if anything comes up it will be practically impossible to get a loan while your tugging that amount of student debt, so you'd have to be good enough to always be employed and pray that you don't have kids anytime soon.granted that is a very long series of assumptions most of which downplay the circumstances for instance most loans are compounded monthly so the debt would have been higher than I mentioned, also I only took off 10k for taxes which is a few grand less than what you would actually pay in taxes on a postdoc salary.
also after a couple of years you could be getting a professors salary and be making closer to 60k ( I don't know the statistics on this) which would ease the problem dramaticly, or you could go into industry which has significantly higher salaries.My point was merely to illustrate why someone would be unwilling to pay for grad school. And also why one should avoid debt like the plague.
PS. as a note to everyone with sizeable amounts of student debt in the US, the Fed has cut interest rates by a couple of percent this year and it should be possible to get a consolidation loan this summer at a much lower interest rate than you pay now.
^just seemed relevant considering were talking about student debt.