States With the Most (and Least) Student Debt

A proposed set of new regulations to forgive loans for students who have been defrauded by the schools they attended received more than 10,000 comments by the August 1 deadline. According to estimates by the U.S. Department of Education, if the new rules are adopted, they would lead to the discharge of about $42 billion over the next 10 years. While that’s a good start, it represents just 3.3% of the total amount of student debt outstanding.

At the end of the first quarter of 2016, outstanding balances on college student loans reached $1.26 trillion, a $29 billion sequential increase and a jump of about 6% ($72 billion) compared with the total at the end of the first quarter of 2015, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

In mid-July, the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) released a report on student debt claiming that the level of indebtedness is helping, not hurting, the U.S. economy. The CEA figures that the average student debt for college (not including post-graduate study) is $17,900 and that students with lower total debt are more likely to default. That is due to the fact that students with low debt levels are less likely to have completed their degrees, and, the report said, “It is education, not student debt, that drives persistent differences in homeownership.”

The usual inference is that high levels of student debt reduce the likelihood of homeownership and are a drag on the economy. Clearly, the more one has to pay to stay current on student loan repayment, the less one has to spend elsewhere in the economy.

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Researchers at WalletHub weren’t entirely satisfied with that conclusion and took a deeper look:

[M]any graduates entering the labor market are learning the hard way that a college degree can’t guarantee financial security. Post-college success depends on numerous factors, including where a graduate chooses to put down roots. Student-loan borrowers generally fare better in strong-economy states with low college-debt-to-income ratios.

WalletHub based its state-by-state rankings on nine key metrics ranged from “average student debt” to unemployment rate to percentage of borrowers with past-due debt and generated a score from 1 to 100 (higher is better) based on a weighted average on all nine metrics. They explain their methodology in detail here.

These then are the top 10 states for student borrowers:

1. Utah: total score of 84.18
2. Wyoming: 79.33
3. North Dakota: 70.14
4. Nevada: 69.54
5. Virginia: 68.62
6. Washington: 67.47
7. Alaska: 65.78
8. Colorado: 64.40
9. Hawaii: 64.94
10. New Mexico: 63.11

The worst states for student borrowers are:

1. Washington, D.C.: 36.73
2. West Virginia: 39.37
3. Oregon: 42.95
4. Maine: 44.10
5. Pennsylvania: 46.03
6. Vermont: 46.43
7. South Carolina: 47.14
8. New Hampshire: 47.61
9. Mississippi: 48.76
10. Ohio: 49.21

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