Walking away from college debt free may seem like a dream for some, but for one senior – and new book author – it won’t be.

Zac Bissonnette, author of “Debt-Free U: How I paid for an Outstanding College Education Without Loans, Scholarships, or Mooching Off My Parents” explained how debt is detrimental to students. According to his book, there are other answers for the overwhelming cost of college outside the bonds of student loans.

With warrant, readers could  ask how a 21-year-old U. Massachusetts senior, studying art history, knows anything about the academic financial sector. But Bissonnette has done his research.

In interviews, he weighed the pros and cons of attending expensive, prestigious universities to that of less-expensive, state-run schools during high school. He found the school name on the diploma didn’t mean nearly as much as the individual’s work ethic, he wrote.

His work ethic and his compilation of statistics on debt led the way for Bissonnette to become a financial blogger for AOL during his senior year of high school. Because of his research, CNN, NBC and Fox have interviewed him  about the economy’s influence on college students and recent graduates, and financial gurus like Suze Orman have endorsed him.

The research presented in his book, primarily collected while still in high school, cracks down on how loans hinder more than help. In moments of financial crisis, student loans cannot be discharged if a person declares bankruptcy, unlike credit card debt.

He wrote debt at any point creates risk, and many of his statistics conclude that assuming someone can pay it later barricades his or her career and life goals.

“I think there’s a problem in thinking that college has to be the best four years of your life,” Bissonnette said in an interview with Adam Daniels, a journalism student at U. Minnesota. “Well, if the best four years of your life puts you in so much debt that you can’t pursue the career that you want, you can’t have a family, you can’t buy a house, then that’s the worst four years of your life.”

Jared Mar, a U. Nebraska-Lincoln student, has similar feelings about student debt. Mar is a freshman Spanish major in the Marine Reserve Officers’ Training Corps.

“You should not go into debt for your undergrad,” Mar said. “You should try to counteract it with all other possibilities like scholarships, working or something like the ROTC.”

Mar said he worked all summer to make sure his 18-credit-hour school year would be less financially stressful.

One of Bissonnette’s resolutions to avoid loans is making monthly payments for his student bill. Most state-owned universities, UNL included, allow parents and students to pay monthly installments. This lightens the smothering per-semester cost and allows for monetary flexibility.

At UNL, these monthly payment plans are under-used, said Craig Munier, director of the Office for Scholarships and Financial Aid.

About 62 percent of students who graduated last May had used at least one school loan throughout their education.

The average amount of the debt among these undergraduates was $18,208.

Munier said he worries about the consequences of entirely avoiding debt.

“Working to excess may keep debt down; however, it can also be a detriment to realizing the full benefit of going to college,” he said. “Working, especially off-campus, can be a significant distraction to having the full college experience. So, while you may graduate with less debt, you may also cheat yourself out of many of the reasons why we go to college in the first place.”

Munier also expressed concerns about lower-income families avoiding debt and that it might lead students to dropping out of school entirely.

However, Bissonnette argued in his book that this is the time to build a foundation, and preventing debt gives a greater chance in the playing field of life.

The book’s conversational text guides readers through a web of well-documented statistics that shed light on his views.

While Bissonnette wants to enlighten, he doesn’t use a pair of pliers to crank his audiences’ mouths open and force his ideas down their throats; in fact he promotes the opposite:

“I’m a 21-year-old student at a large public university. You’d have to be out of your mind to take my word for anything! But what you should do is look at the data and draw your own conclusions,” he wrote.

For a topic that seems sticky and complicated, Bissonnette makes it very palatable. Having the vantage point of a fellow college student who will graduate without any debt added gravity to his perspective.

Bissonnette’s book encourages students to remain in college debt-free so they can have the careers they want without creditors knocking on the door 10 to 20 years after graduation.