$45,000 is well above the average student loan debt even as of 2021, which is variously reported as $35-40k (but see $30k, below). The median debt amount is substantially lower (~1/2), but it doesn't fit the narrative so it's rarely reported.
What's unclear to me is whether these numbers are for all outstanding debt, or for debts at graduation. This site says the 2021 average debt at graduation is $36k, https://educationdata.org/average-student-loan-debt-by-year ($30k at https://thecollegeinvestor.com/33643/average-student-loan-mo...). But this site says the median outstanding debt amount for all people with student loans is $20-25k, https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2021-economic-we... That's very confusing, especially considering that [1] and [2] give $17k and $19k, respectively, for the median. I can't square these numbers unless, perhaps, it's the case that people even at the lower end aren't paying down principal and are accumulating interest debt. (EDIT: The "all outstanding" median Fed figure makes more sense when you realize that it excludes those who managed to pay off their loans entirely, and so it will have a long tail of very high debt students, the very same students inflating the average to begin with, and the ones most likely to be stuck in a debt trap.)
[1] https://thecollegeinvestor.com/33643/average-student-loan-mo... [2] https://www.valuepenguin.com/average-student-loan-debt
There's another possibility too: People who attended but never graduated. I know someone who went to a community college for a year, taking out about $10K in student loans, but dropped out before completing their Associate's. [0]
The thing is, there's so many possible categories when it comes to considering loan debt. People who didn't graduate, people who got an Associate's and stopped, people who got an Associate's and kept going, but didn't finish their Bachelor's, people (like me) who were able to stay in their existing home while going to school versus having to stay in college housing...I could go on.
And how you choose which subset of student loan debtors can determine the narrative you want to shape. If a study only focuses on people with at least a Master's that stayed in college dorms, then you'll probably get a high number, but of course the news sites will have a headline that claims "The average college grad has $XXX,XXX in student loan debt", and only mention in the body of the article (that many people won't read) that it's only a subset of college grads.
[0] Somewhat irrelevant footnote: This person then rants about college being a complete waste of money because you'll "still end up working Comcast tech support for $13/hour".
At some point, I think we'll have to get serious about letting the universities collapse and providing opportunities to get the other benefits without spiraling costs. Maybe a large fraction of our grandkids will end up going to college in Estonia, which will make it their "thing" to provide high quality education for a fraction of the price. Or maybe the US will import the apprenticeship model from Germany. Or maybe remote work will become so common that it'll become normal for post high school kids to congregate in inexpensive apartment complexes with decent videoconferencing setups, companies will finally get back to investing in training their new employees, and we can call it dorms 2.0.
When going to college means taking on tens of thousands of dollars in debt, it makes sense to start looking at ROI, especially when there's a certain group of people that will tell you "If you want to make a living wage, then you need to go to college and make something of yourself!", then will ostracize them for making bad financial decisions when they take on massive student loan debt to pay for the college.
EDIT: To add a point of anecdata, when I finished my BS in CS in 2014, I came out with ~$45,000 in student loan debt. And this is on the LOWER end of debt, and I was only able to have it so low because I had already been living in the city my university was in. I still worked ~30 hours/week while going to school full time. If I had to stay in dorms or something, I probably would have had $100K+ in debt. It's absolutely ridiculous.