“student Loan Debt And College Completion Rates: A Complex Relationship” – Graduates need a plan to pay back any money they chose to borrow. Let’s see how much that is on average.
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“student Loan Debt And College Completion Rates: A Complex Relationship”
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“Currently, student loan debt at graduation is an estimated $31,100. Despite the rising cost of tuition, graduates who have been out of school for years often owe more than recent graduates due to interest rates.
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Nearly Half Of College Grads With Student Loan Debt Don’t Think Their College Degree Helped Them Earn More Money
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Student Loans And
Still, they continued to save as much as they could. So far, it feels like it’s going well. Their oldest son, now 20, received some scholarship money and ultimately chose a school that Burnham calls “reasonably priced” — Husson University in Bangor, Maine. Tuition, room and board was about $25,000 a year when he was a freshman.
Still, that’s more for a single year than Burnham’s entire college education — at a private liberal arts college in Ohio — cost in the 1980s. It’s something he just doesn’t understand.
“I wonder why college costs so much more today than it did 25 years ago,” he said. “What is the driving factor, or forces, behind such increases in the cost of attending a four-year school these days?”
Today, approximately 70% of American students take out loans to attend college. The average graduate leaves school with about $30,000 in debt, and all told, about 45 million Americans owe $1.6 trillion in student loans — and counting.
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How did we get here? Slowly, over decades, according to Mark Kantrowitz, publisher and vice president of research at the website Saving for College. “You can compare it to
Cook a lobster, he said. “When you find the water boiling, you’re already cooked.”
For much of American history, college was for the elite. If you couldn’t afford it, you didn’t go. That began to change in 1944 when Congress, hoping to keep the economy strong, passed the G.I. Bill, which included massive amounts of funding for World War II veterans to attend college.

It wasn’t until the late 1950s that federal student loans first appeared. Even then, they were limited, intended to encourage people to study subjects that would help the United States compete with the Soviet Union in the space race.
College Graduation Statistics
The student loan system as we know it today was born out of the Higher Education Act of 1965, which was designed to “strengthen the educational resources of our colleges and universities and to provide financial assistance to students in postsecondary and higher education.”
Financial aid came primarily in two forms – grants, which did not have to be repaid, and low-interest student loans, which did.
“We have to remember that these loans were originally intended only for students from higher-income families, students whose families had the means to repay the loans,” said Michelle Asha Cooper, president of the Institute for Higher Education Policy.
During the late 1970s, 80s, and early 90s, however, Congress continued to pass new laws one after another that expanded student loan eligibility, eliminated income requirements, and allowed parents to borrow for their children’s educations.
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A fundamental, philosophical shift took place around the same time, under President Ronald Reagan, away from federal investment in things like higher education and toward individual responsibility. Away from grants and against loans.
Between 1988 and 2018, tuition increased more than 200% at four-year public colleges and nearly 130% at private nonprofit colleges.
However, there is a big difference between the shockingly high sticker prices and the amount most students pay after accounting for scholarships and grants.

“If you look at America’s private [non-profit] colleges, and you don’t look at the list price, you don’t look at the sticker price in the catalog, but you look at the price the average student pays, the net price ? It’s barely moved since 1990 , says David Feldman, co-author of the book “Why Does College Cost So Much?” and an economics professor at the College of William and Mary. “People just react in shock when I tell them that.”
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Where the price the average student pays has increased much more is at public colleges, which most Americans attend.
“Since the mid-1980s, the level of state funding for public higher education has fallen by about 30%,” said Feldman, who described this as “the driver of price increases for average families.”
“People often want to look at higher education in isolation, like it’s some kind of special case industry… But it’s embedded in the American economy.”
The American economy is simply not working as well as it used to for most families. Along with the cost of college, the cost of living has risen, while family income has remained flat since at least the late 1990s.
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Which for many students looking to get an advanced degree has meant that the only option is to borrow more.
The federal government has also been inclined to raise student loan limits rather than grant amounts and “call the problem solved,” Kantrowitz said. “Even if it just puts more of the burden on the families.”
Take Pell Grants, the largest source of federal grants for low-income students. In 1975, these grants covered 79% of tuition, fees, room and board at a four-year public college, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. In 2017, they only covered 29% of the same costs.

“We have more and more students in all income brackets taking out loans,” says Michelle Asha Cooper of IHEP. As the cost of college has increased over the years, she said, “the investment in need-based aid has failed to keep pace with the rising cost.”
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Seth Frotman, executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center and former student loan ombudsman at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said there’s another factor that doesn’t get enough attention in this conversation: the lingering effects of the Great Recession.
“One of the ways that we saw the student debt crisis rise at the agency was because of this historic divestment of higher education in statehouses across the country,” Frotman said.
As tax revenues fell, and states had to find ways to cut budgets, many of them decided they could live with cutting funding for state universities in the belief, Frotman said, that “families could pick up more of the game.”
At the same time, however, families, like states, were hit hard by the financial crisis – lost jobs, homes, savings.
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“We haven’t really recovered from this cycle where we’re just putting more and more of the higher education burden into higher tuition bills, which are necessarily covered in the form of consumer debt like student loans,” Frotman said.
“People never think about loans now creating opportunity, but they create opportunity for many students who otherwise wouldn’t be able to go to college,” said Sandy Baum, a higher education finance expert at the Urban Institute.
She points out that the majority of those who take out student loans are still able to pay

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