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> Posted by Center Staff
It’s common knowledge in the United States that the student loan situation is bad and getting worse, but what are the actual statistics and how severe is this trend? Like other kinds of debt, student debt has innumerable implications for young borrowers, as well as for the country’s recovering economy.
A new report from the New America Foundation inspects undergraduate student loan debt data from the past ten years, compiling borrower rates and amounts, in aggregate and by institution and degree type. The report, The Student Debt Review, draws from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Studies, a national survey series of student financial aid. Here are some of the report’s main findings:
- More students are indebted. Across all institution and degree types, the percentage of graduates with debt increased from 54 percent in 2004 to 62 percent in 2012. In 2004 there were 1.6 million graduates with debt. By 2012 there were 2.4 million.
- They owe more. Total student loan debt increased by an average of $3,300 between 2008 and 2012 after a period of four years in which it changed only marginally (2004-2008).
- For-profit colleges are a sore spot. Student debt is increasing especially quickly for bachelor’s degree recipients at private for-profit colleges, who now graduate with an average debt of $40,000 and pay $153 more each month than those graduating with bachelor’s degrees at public colleges. A very high proportion of the bachelor’s degree graduates at private for-profit colleges have borrowed (87 percent), compared to public colleges (64 percent).
> Posted by Elisabeth Rhyne, Managing Director, CFI
The following post was originally published on the CGAP Blog.
Gabriel Davel knows what he’s talking about, and so should you. Davel is the veteran bank regulator who helped create and lead South Africa’s National Credit Regulator, one of the most capable financial consumer protection agencies in the world. In CGAP’s new Focus Note, Regulatory Options to Curb Debt Stress, Davel draws on the experience of a number of debt crises in microfinance and consumer credit and distills his own hard-won experience into practical guidance aimed mainly at regulators, but also highly relevant for financial institutions.
A perennially intriguing – and urgent – question is how regulators can tell when a crisis of reckless lending and over-indebtedness is on its way. Before a crisis hits, everyone has interests in credit expansion: individuals want loans, lenders want to grow their client base and loan portfolios, and governments want credit expansion, especially for previously excluded clients. But at some point, the bubble over-inflates, highly-leveraged clients are living precariously, and even a modest economic shock can trigger the inevitable collapse. Davel recounts 11 such incidents in microfinance and consumer finance. In their book, This Time is Different, on banking panics, Reinhart and Rogoff document not dozens but hundreds of similar crises throughout history. Their point? It is never different. Credit markets fool themselves time after time.
Is there any way for financial sector participants, happily tipsy from an expansion of credit, to recognize when they need to slow down? Does it take a restrictive set of credit rules? What are the secrets to responsible credit?
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