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Incoming students fill a classroom at Clark State Community College’s Leffel Lane campus as they register for fall classes.
Jill Gonzalez, an analyst with the online-survey website WalletHub said OH ranks near the bottom, coming in at 42nd in the nation in her group’s analysis of the best and worst states for student debt.
WalletHub recently looked at all 50 states and the District of Columbia across nine key metrics: average student debt, unemployment rate for people aged 25 to 34, percentage of students with past-due loan balances, etc. She said Utah placed high in all of those categories. Only 9.8 percent of indebted college graduates in Utah defaulted on student loans between 2011 and 2013, compared to 13.7 percent nationally, according to the Utah System of Higher Education report.
The report also found the average Utah student loan debt is $22,418, less than the national average of $28,400. Critics of student debt also dispute the view that an undergraduate major “plays a significant role in the promotion to the highest levels of corporate leadership”.
Only about half of Utah college students graduate with student loans, the Utah System of Higher Education reported previous year, compared to 7 in 10 students nationally.
In current education discourse, much discussion centers on the rising student debt burden in the United States, causing alarm in some quarters.
“When we’re just looking at the average student debt, it’s over $29,000, that’s per borrower, and that makes up around 41 percent of someone’s total income in OH”, she said.
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School is just around the corner and some eager freshman are about to make the plunge into college. Other analysis focuses on the increase in the number of people attending college, which drives up the total amount of student debt dramatically, as well as the average amount of debt it appears each student carries based on this big picture view.
