Whether student debt loads are contributing to the decline in home ownership or not, the personal horror stories making headlines are not normative. That isn’t to say that lots of people don’t have loads of student loads. But on a percentage based, it’s a minority: In 2012, less than 10 percent of students completing a bachelor’s degree had more than $49,000 in debt. Only 0.3 percent of undergraduates had six figures of debt. The median debt at graduation for a bachelor’s degree was just under $17,000. (The average figure in 2012 has been reported by another source as being just north of $29,000.)
Along these same lines, a report just out from the Brookings Institutions provides a breakdown in education debt for households of 20-40 year olds:
- 58 percent have less than $10,000 in debt.
- 18 percent have debt in the $10-20k range.
- 24 percent have more than$20k in debt.
That’s better than I would have thought, but one problem with reporting the data this way is that a 39 year old with $9,000 in debt may have originally borrowed $30,000. Regardless, one clear concern from the Brookings data is that among households with some college but no bachelor’s degree, the incidence of debt increased from 11 to 41 percent from 1989 to 2010. Some of these people earned associate degrees and are benefiting financially. But many more are college dropouts.