Enrollment Patterns. College-going patterns exacerbate high debt levels for African American students. As noted above, African Americans are more likely than others to enroll in for-profit institutions, where tuition prices are higher than at public colleges and universities.
Black students take out the most student loan debt for a bachelor's degree, followed by white students. Black bachelor's degree holders have an average of $52,000 in student debt. Eighty-six percent of Black students take out student loans to pay for college, compared to 68 percent of white students.
Federal Student Loans by Age
Unsurprisingly, younger people hold the majority of student loan debt. Borrowers between the ages of 25 and 34 carry about $500 billion in federal student loans—the majority of people in this age group owe between $10,000 and $40,000.
Globally, student loan debt in the U.S. is second only to the United Kingdom, according to a 2022 Lending Tree report.
For decades, there had been enthusiastic bipartisan agreement that states should fund high-quality public colleges so that their youth could receive higher education for free or nearly so. As a result of this ideological swing, student loan debt began to mount.
Increased enrollment in for-profit schools and increased borrowing rates among community college students account for much of the recent doubling in default rates, with changes in the type of schools attended, debt burdens, and labor market outcomes of non-traditional borrowers explaining the change, Looney and ...
In all the sound and fury of the budget discussion of recent days, this administration has been portrayed as an opponent of educational ideas engaged in total warfare against the academic community sole defender of cultural and intellectual progress.
Women owe a disproportionately high amount of the total student loan debt. Women are also more likely to have high amounts of debt. Some of this is likely due to the fact that female bachelor's degree holders are paid 74% of what their male peers make.
Interest can make student loans more expensive, while inflation can make that debt harder to manage alongside other bills. Paying off some of your debt during your studies could ease the burden later on and save you money on interest.
86% of white undergraduate students use student loans to pay for school. 58% of student loans go to white students. 50.8% of Black students use student loans. 14% of loans go to black students.
"The truth is these loans are very complicated financial instruments… have compounding interest, which means that you could start paying down your debt right after college, but the interest is so high it multiplies and becomes impossible to get out from under it," Zeff said.
If those monthly payments look low compared to what most borrowers pay, it's because most borrowers carry a lot more than $20,000 in student loan debt. As of March 2023, the average federal student loan debt in the United States was about $37,720, according to a BestColleges analysis of Education Department data.
Non-Hispanic Black Americans reported the lowest average credit card debt amount in 2020, $3,940. The average credit card debt reported for Hispanic Americans was $5,510. Non-Hispanic white Americans reported the highest debt amount, $6,940.
Oral surgeons have the highest average amount of student loan debt, according to a 2023 report from personal banking and finance company SoFi. SoFi identified the 16 professional specialties with the highest average student loan debt, with 14 of the careers being in healthcare.
Around 23% of Americans are debt free, according to the most recent data available from the Federal Reserve. That figure factors in every type of debt, from credit card balances and student loans to mortgages, car loans and more.
Short-term consumption levels could be boosted by as much as 4 percent, increasing real GDP by between $86 billion and $108 billion over 10 years. New economic activity generated by debt cancellation would reduce the unemployment rate between 0.22 and 0.36 percentage points over the next decade.
Data Summary. The average federal student loan payment is about $302 for bachelor's and $208 for associate degree-completers. The average monthly repayment for master's degree-holders is about $688.
There are 9 U.S. presidents reported to have never attended college, including George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Grover Cleveland, and Harry Truman.
Harvard University, with a $50.9 billion endowment as of 2022, is the wealthiest university in the world.
Less than 1% of the $5.3 trillion annual federal budget could be used to make college free for all. A First-Dollar tuition-free program would cost $58 billion the year it is implemented. Over an 11-year time frame, a First-Dollar Tuition-Free program would cost a total of $800 billion.
It's the result of a decades-long explosion in borrowing coupled with soaring education costs. The Federal Reserve data shows people under the age of 30 are more likely to have student loan debt compared with older adults – underscoring the crippling burden on another generation of Americans.
That means about 9 million Americans who have payments due are not making them. The figure does not include borrowers who are still in school or who recently left and do not yet owe payments, or whose payment deadlines were extended due to loan servicing errors.
Three of the major arguments in favor of broad student debt cancellation are: Student loan debt slows new business growth and limits consumer spending. Broad student loan debt forgiveness may help boost the national economy by making it more affordable for borrowers to participate in it.