4 ms·

> was never guaranteed to come back anyway do you know what % gets back. This data looks like really hard to find. (One article says around 40-50% [1]) So its

> was never guaranteed to come back anyway do you know what % gets back. This data looks like really hard to find. (One article says around 40-50% [1]) So its a loss of 750-900 million in revenue to the govt? 1. https://www.credible.com/blog/statistics/average-time-to-repay-student-loans-statistics/ https://www.credible.com/blog/statistics/average-time-to-rep...

lapcat 4y ago
I don't know the % total. But I did find that student loan payments were $70 billion per year (in 2019, before the suspension of payments). Which is only 4% of the outstanding debt. And of course new debt keeps getting issued every year. https://slate.com/business/2021/03/student-loan-total-annual-government-payments.html https://slate.com/business/2021/03/student-loan-total-annual...
wahern 4y ago
Most student loans are repaid. That fact is indeed difficult to discover online. (I'd paste a link, but it'd take awhile to track down, again. You learn more about how much intentional and unintentional bias there is by pouring through published reports yourself, anyhow.) The average student loan debt burden at graduation is also much lower compared to commonly cited statistics--e.g. $~30k circa 2021 according to https://educationdata.org/average-student-loan-debt-by-year https://educationdata.org/average-student-loan-debt-by-year, but I'm not sure if those figures include graduate loans. For 4-year undergraduate programs at public universities the average is lower still--~$26k (see https://www.aplu.org/our-work/5-archived-projects/college-costs-tuition-and-financial-aid/publicuvalues/student-debt.html https://www.aplu.org/our-work/5-archived-projects/college-co....). And note that these are averages; medians are significantly lower (on the order of $5-10k, IIRC) but almost as bothersome to find as the percentage of student who pay off their loans. Published statistics are highly misleading because once a loan balance is repaid in full its no longer included in statistics. IOW, statistics only include outstanding balances, and over time that group increasingly skews toward the small subset that are never able to reach a $0 balance. That subset naturally also skews toward much higher outstanding balances, both because they skew toward much higher balances at graduation, but also because their inability to bring it down to $0 strongly correlates with inability to bring down the balance at all, and thus face balances inflated by compounding interest. Similarly, students who never had to borrow (wealthier parents, or poor enough to receive free rides through grants and scholarships) are excluded from balance numbers--42% for 4-year public universities according to https://www.aplu.org/our-work/5-archived-projects/college-costs-tuition-and-financial-aid/publicuvalues/publicuvalues-resources/q2/debtcapimage.jpg.png https://www.aplu.org/our-work/5-archived-projects/college-co... (via link above). Another major bias factor is that many statistics (perhaps most?) aggregate data for both undergraduate and graduate students, the latter usually including business, law, and medicine. (Occasionally you'll see reports disaggregating medical and sometimes law students.) Graduate students tend to have much larger balances. Many of them also tend to have much more earning power, but those who pay off their balances disappear from the data (see above). Graduate program data is irrelevant to the question on most people's minds--is college (i.e. undergraduate) worth it?
- lapcat 4y ago
  > Graduate program data is irrelevant to the question on most people's minds--is college (i.e. undergraduate) worth it? As a former graduate student in the humanities, and a longtime holder of student loan debt, I don't consider graduate program data irrelevant. In fact it's extremely relevant to me. Graduate students owe half of all student loan debt, despite being only 25% of all student loan debtors. It's a massive problem, but graduate students are largely ignored. Graduate students are exploited by universities for cheap labor. They need grad students for teaching and research purposes. But the PhD completion rate is low, and then good luck getting a tenure track job, much less tenure. Some people want to make college all about money and earnings potential, but it's not. It's about education, scholarship, research, the advance and accumulation of knowledge. If college were nothing but a money-making scheme for students, then it would make no sense to even have public universities. In that case they all ought to be private, for profit schools like... um, ITT. ;-) Do you want to abolish the humanities? Abolish everything that doesn't result in high earnings? Alternatively, do you want to make them only accessible to rich kids who don't have to borrow? The elephant in the room of student loan debt is that people who go to college are literally better educated. In other words, less ignorant. College is not a cure-all for ignorance, but it's a lot better than nothing. And it's difficult to have a functioning democracy if we put education behind a paywall. Arguably, we don't have a functioning democracy...
  - wahern 4y ago
    > It's a massive problem A massive problem compared to what? That's the problem I have with most published statistics in this area: they're aggregated and reported in a manner that attempts to answer that question from the outset. They start from the presumption that it is a massive problem, and then aggregate and report data in a way that exaggerates effects. I personally would be happy to vote for policies that increase public funding of public universities with the aim to reduce or eliminate the need for loans when attending such schools. But beyond that, it seems difficult to address these problems without greater specificity regarding the problems and potential solutions. Based on most popular reporting, Federal-subsidized loan programs seem massively exploitative on their face, but if the vast majority of people are able to pay them back, and given the percentage of Americans with postsecondary degrees (50% ages 25-64 as of 2020 according to https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cac/intl-ed-attainment https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cac/intl-ed-attai..., behind only Canada, Luxembourg, Korea, and Israel among OECD countries), then it's not nearly as obvious that they're a net negative overall (notwithstanding the seemingly intuitively obvious inflation potential), and perhaps more targeted policies are appropriate. Pointing out that reporting is misleading doesn't put someone on one side of a debate or another. Moreover, figuring out alternatives is far more difficult than identifying problems. If someone is actually earnest about adopting constructive remedies, I would think an accurate understanding of the nature of the problem(s) would be highly valued. If you're primarily concerned about issues regarding PhD programs, hooking your wagon to general solutions principally targeting undergraduate financing could backfire.

lapcat 4y ago

I don't know the % total. But I did find that student loan payments were $70 billion per year (in 2019, before the suspension of payments). Which is only 4% of the outstanding debt. And of course new debt keeps getting issued every year. https://slate.com/business/2021/03/student-loan-total-annual-government-payments.html https://slate.com/business/2021/03/student-loan-total-annual...

wahern 4y ago

Most student loans are repaid. That fact is indeed difficult to discover online. (I'd paste a link, but it'd take awhile to track down, again. You learn more about how much intentional and unintentional bias there is by pouring through published reports yourself, anyhow.) The average student loan debt burden at graduation is also much lower compared to commonly cited statistics--e.g. $~30k circa 2021 according to https://educationdata.org/average-student-loan-debt-by-year https://educationdata.org/average-student-loan-debt-by-year, but I'm not sure if those figures include graduate loans. For 4-year undergraduate programs at public universities the average is lower still--~$26k (see https://www.aplu.org/our-work/5-archived-projects/college-costs-tuition-and-financial-aid/publicuvalues/student-debt.html https://www.aplu.org/our-work/5-archived-projects/college-co....). And note that these are averages; medians are significantly lower (on the order of $5-10k, IIRC) but almost as bothersome to find as the percentage of student who pay off their loans. Published statistics are highly misleading because once a loan balance is repaid in full its no longer included in statistics. IOW, statistics only include outstanding balances, and over time that group increasingly skews toward the small subset that are never able to reach a $0 balance. That subset naturally also skews toward much higher outstanding balances, both because they skew toward much higher balances at graduation, but also because their inability to bring it down to $0 strongly correlates with inability to bring down the balance at all, and thus face balances inflated by compounding interest. Similarly, students who never had to borrow (wealthier parents, or poor enough to receive free rides through grants and scholarships) are excluded from balance numbers--42% for 4-year public universities according to https://www.aplu.org/our-work/5-archived-projects/college-costs-tuition-and-financial-aid/publicuvalues/publicuvalues-resources/q2/debtcapimage.jpg.png https://www.aplu.org/our-work/5-archived-projects/college-co... (via link above). Another major bias factor is that many statistics (perhaps most?) aggregate data for both undergraduate and graduate students, the latter usually including business, law, and medicine. (Occasionally you'll see reports disaggregating medical and sometimes law students.) Graduate students tend to have much larger balances. Many of them also tend to have much more earning power, but those who pay off their balances disappear from the data (see above). Graduate program data is irrelevant to the question on most people's minds--is college (i.e. undergraduate) worth it?

lapcat 4y ago
> Graduate program data is irrelevant to the question on most people's minds--is college (i.e. undergraduate) worth it? As a former graduate student in the humanities, and a longtime holder of student loan debt, I don't consider graduate program data irrelevant. In fact it's extremely relevant to me. Graduate students owe half of all student loan debt, despite being only 25% of all student loan debtors. It's a massive problem, but graduate students are largely ignored. Graduate students are exploited by universities for cheap labor. They need grad students for teaching and research purposes. But the PhD completion rate is low, and then good luck getting a tenure track job, much less tenure. Some people want to make college all about money and earnings potential, but it's not. It's about education, scholarship, research, the advance and accumulation of knowledge. If college were nothing but a money-making scheme for students, then it would make no sense to even have public universities. In that case they all ought to be private, for profit schools like... um, ITT. ;-) Do you want to abolish the humanities? Abolish everything that doesn't result in high earnings? Alternatively, do you want to make them only accessible to rich kids who don't have to borrow? The elephant in the room of student loan debt is that people who go to college are literally better educated. In other words, less ignorant. College is not a cure-all for ignorance, but it's a lot better than nothing. And it's difficult to have a functioning democracy if we put education behind a paywall. Arguably, we don't have a functioning democracy...
- wahern 4y ago
  > It's a massive problem A massive problem compared to what? That's the problem I have with most published statistics in this area: they're aggregated and reported in a manner that attempts to answer that question from the outset. They start from the presumption that it is a massive problem, and then aggregate and report data in a way that exaggerates effects. I personally would be happy to vote for policies that increase public funding of public universities with the aim to reduce or eliminate the need for loans when attending such schools. But beyond that, it seems difficult to address these problems without greater specificity regarding the problems and potential solutions. Based on most popular reporting, Federal-subsidized loan programs seem massively exploitative on their face, but if the vast majority of people are able to pay them back, and given the percentage of Americans with postsecondary degrees (50% ages 25-64 as of 2020 according to https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cac/intl-ed-attainment https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cac/intl-ed-attai..., behind only Canada, Luxembourg, Korea, and Israel among OECD countries), then it's not nearly as obvious that they're a net negative overall (notwithstanding the seemingly intuitively obvious inflation potential), and perhaps more targeted policies are appropriate. Pointing out that reporting is misleading doesn't put someone on one side of a debate or another. Moreover, figuring out alternatives is far more difficult than identifying problems. If someone is actually earnest about adopting constructive remedies, I would think an accurate understanding of the nature of the problem(s) would be highly valued. If you're primarily concerned about issues regarding PhD programs, hooking your wagon to general solutions principally targeting undergraduate financing could backfire.