Take a stroll through Boston, and they’re everywhere: Streaming around Northeastern University, into the Wentworth Institute of Technology, through BU and Tufts, into Simmons and MassArt, and taking the Red Line over to Harvard and MIT in Cambridge.

Each and every one of them, potential little time bombs, strutting about as if they’re going to conquer the world, not realizing that many of them are more likely to be the makers of the next world-class economic inferno.

Take a trip to the top of the library at UMass Amherst, and look far and wide at the five-college area. Look at Mount Holyoke, Amherst, Hampshire and Smith. The young men and women are all out there, enjoying the fine weather; failing to understand that they aren’t students, but walking piles of debt. It’s like they have an unacknowledged degenerative disease that’s going to make their adult life a nightmare.

It’s certainly going to make their Realtor’s life a lot harder.

The Biggest Burden

Earlier this month, a team of economists at the New York Fed issued a report that confirmed what any middle-class parent of a student at Holy Cross in Worcester could tell you: Student loan debt is growing exponentially, and is threatening the overall health of the U.S. economy. It’s certainly threatening to the overall health of many households.

In the United States, consumers owe about $730 billion for the cars they drive. They owe another $630 billion on their credit cards. Both of those debts are junior to what’s owed for student loans. That figure now tops $870 billion, and it’s rising at a rate of about $70 billion a year. By the time this year’s freshman class tosses their caps into the air three years from now, student loan debt should have surpassed the $1.1 trillion mark.

This has the Fed economists quivering with worry. And rightly so: this is debt being used to prepare young people for careers that don’t seem to be materializing, for future income that doesn’t look like it’s going to be enough to meet the cash flow necessary to live a middle-class life, for a way of life that’s retreating further from reach. According to the Project on Student Debt, two-thirds of college seniors graduated with loans in 2010, and they carried an average of $25,250 in debt. They also faced the highest unemployment rate for young college graduates in recent history at 9.1 percent.

And it’s going to have particular effects in Massachusetts, particularly in greater Boston. The commonwealth ranks 12th in the nation for student debt burden.

But when students graduate with debt in North Carolina, or Colorado, or Nebraska, they enter the workforce in areas with much lower costs of living than we have here. Kiplinger’s Personal Finance ranks the cost of living in Boston as 30 percent higher than the rest of the United States. And that’s why college graduates earning $45,000 a year here are still living in apartments with three or four roommates, and wondering if they’ve got enough money each week to buy food.

Homeownership Foreclosed

Boston is recovering from the massive run-up in unemployment that crippled it over the last few years. And its housing and mortgage market is also on the mend. But what does that housing future look like if we’re counting on new homebuyers who enter the market already hobbled by outsized debt?

This isn’t a rhetorical question. Lenders aren’t keen on seeing consumer balance sheets so out-of-whack. According to the Federal Reserve, among those ages 29 to 34, only 9 percent got a first-time mortgage over the past three years, compared with nearly twice that figure a decade ago. And although we may make some headway on the employment front (Look, they’ve got income!) we’re going to fall back on the other side of the ledger (Holy smokes! Look how much more debt they’ve got!).

The problem remains that the income these saddled students will earn isn’t going to be enough to keep their heads above the rising flood of fiscal obligations. The Fed estimates that more than one in four student loans is currently delinquent. Meanwhile, the National Association of Bankruptcy Attorneys says that more than 80 percent of their members have seen a “substantial” increase in clients seeking relief from their student loan obligations.

But student loans are like Superman when it comes to trying to defeat them; you need a piece of Kryptonite, and that’s pretty hard to get (you have to prove “substantial hardship,” which rarely flies with the court). Without that, the student loan debt stays flying over your head.

Remember, this isn’t just an issue for the young. Many parents have guaranteed their children’s education obligations. And that rising debt is eroding their fiscal foundation, too. If young people are finding it hard to buy their first home, members of the older generation may likewise find themselves hobbled in many ways — a hit to their credit, drained savings and a lack of ability to become move-up buyers in the housing market.

All those students, out on the quads, enjoying their lattes and Frisbees, having political discussions or sketching in their art books as spring shines gloriously down. It’s said that college is often the best time in a person’s life. For the students we see around the state, with the prison of debt waiting for them after graduation, that saying is probably all too sadly true.

Vincent M. Valvo is CEO of Agility Resources Group. He can be reached at vvalvo@agilityresourcesgroup.com.