The Deepest in Debt

Inside Higher Ed
April 27, 2010
There's a subtle debate unfolding among financial aid experts and advocates for students about just how much student loan debt is too much. While some recent studies have declared a crisis in student borrowing, citing the growing number of student borrowers and the amounts they owe, the College Board, in a report released Monday, seeks to reframe the discussion by focusing on those deepest in debt.
It's not that the authors of the College Board report, Sandy Baum and Patricia Steele, don't think there's a major problem with student loan debt; they do, and their report, "Who Borrows Most? Bachelor's Degree Recipients With High Levels of Student Debt," offers plenty of troubling data. But in an era where grant money is usually insufficient to meet ever-rising tuition costs, it's not borrowing per se that's the problem, they argue; it's the amount and types of loans that are likeliest to land borrowers in significant financial trouble. ..

And while Steele warns against paying too much attention to breakdowns by race, because some of the sample sizes are small, data in the report do suggest that black graduates are likelier than students of other races to accumulate high debt totals (27 percent vs. 16 percent for white students, 14 percent for Hispanic/Latino students, and 9 percent for Asian students).

Full Story: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/04/27/debt
Full College Board Report: http://advocacy.collegeboard.org/sites/default/files/Trends-Who-Borrows-Most-Brief.pdf