Millennial Student Debt

In much of the existing higher education literature, “college access” is understood in terms of pre-college educational attainment, social and informational networks, and financial capacity, both for tuition and living expenses. The US ranks highly on initial college access by comparison with other countries, but this access—along with all major metrics of college success, including completion rates, default rates, and debt-to-income ratios—exhibits drastic inequality along familiar lines of race, gender, class, and geography.

View the full post on the Phenomenal World here.

View the interactive map here.

View the press release here.

During and after the Great Recession, public funding for higher education was slashed as state budgets imposed austerity measures. Staff and programs were cut and tuition rose; in many states, even by 2018, funding had not returned to pre-recession levels. Meanwhile, enrollment soared. As students locked out of a slack labor market were told they lacked the skills necessary for today’s jobs, the solution to unemployment and wage stagnation was to be found in the pursuit of more degrees at higher prices. The result was the acceleration of what is now a four or five-decade trend in US higher education: the replacement of a public good model with a private consumer model, dependent on tuition financed with federal debt, all justified on the back of supposed earnings increases that fail to materialize.

View the full post on the Phenomenal World here.

View the interactive map here.

View our news writeup with key takeaways here.

Since the Great Recession, outstanding student loan debt in the United States has increased by 122% in 2019 dollars, reaching the staggering sum of $1.66 trillion in June of this year. Student loan debt has grown faster than other debt types, including auto, credit card and mortgage debt. For many, education is the only pathway towards good employment with benefits, leading to economic and social opportunities later in life. But as college becomes more unaffordable with each passing year, student loans are bridging the ever-expanding chasm between college savings and obtaining an education. The crisis has reached the national political arena, with policymakers recently calling for debt cancellation up to $50,000 for federal borrowers.

View the full post on the Phenomenal World here.

View the interactive map here.

View the press release here.

Immediately following the September 2020 release of Part 3, “Unceasing Debt, Disparate Burdens: Student Debt and Young America,” the research team published an interactive map of congressional-level student debt trends from 2009 to 2019. With the approach of the 2020 election, the tool allows advocates, policymakers, and constituents to track student debt burdens, education costs, income, and geographic access at the district level.

View the interactive map here. Click the toggle at top right to view the congressional overlay.

View the press release here.

JFI joined the Higher Ed Not Debt coalition to add our research to a broader set of organizations investigating and advocating around rising student debt levels nationwide. In a “#CancelStudentDebt Week of Action” in late September, Higher Ed Not Debt organizations utilized fact sheets featuring JFI’s recently-released data mapping student debt levels nationwide. View the fact sheets here.

Over the last ten years, as outstanding student loan debt has mounted and been assumed by a more diverse, less affluent group of students and their families than was the case for prior cohorts, a common policy response has been to wave away its impact on wealth, both individually and in aggregate, by saying that the debt finances its own repayment. First of all, so the claim goes, student debt finances college degrees that in turn pay off in the form of higher earnings, enabling debtors to repay. Second, expanded allowance for income-driven repayment (IDR), by capping debt service as a share of disposable income, eliminates the worst forms of delinquency and default. The first claim says that repayment is inevitable, the second that it need not take place. Both claims together, however, serve to rationalize higher debt, higher tuition, higher attainment, and the forces driving all three.

View the full post, by JFI senior fellow Marshall Steinbaum, on the Phenomenal World here.

View the press release here.