Miller pointed to data showing that Florida has the 13th highest student loan default rate in the country. How much individual students will end up owing differs widely, however.
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The new data is timely, since two state Senate committees held a hearing Monday on troubling accusations of aggressive and predatory lending by the New Jersey Higher Education Student Assistance Authority.
LendEDU released its Student Loan Debt By School By State Report which analyzes state and college level data on student debt for the Class of 2015. The data was reported through a survey to the colleges and universities listed in the report. “The school level Average Student Debt per Borrower is the cumulative principal borrowed through any loan programs for the last graduating undergraduate class.Federal Perkins, Federal Stafford Subsidized and Unsubsidized, institutional, state, private loans that the institution is aware of, etc.”, says Alex Coleman, LendEDU’s director of business development.
To put things in perspective, LendEDU’s research team looked some of the broader trends affecting borrowers. Forty percent of undergraduates at public universities graduate without any debt, and those who do borrow graduate with an average of $25,500 in debt. University of Florida students with loans finished school owing an average of $21,028; Florida International University graduates owed an average of $18,918. Private institutions gave average borrowers $31,710 in student debt, whereas public institutions gave average borrowers $26,872 in student debt. And recent changes to streamline the Free Application for Federal Student Aid will provide students with the ability to apply for aid sooner, so students and families have a more accurate picture of college costs as they apply for and select their colleges. At nonprofit public and private colleges in 2015, six out of ten graduates had student debt. On the other hand, students at Dalton State College in Georgia averaged only $3,000 per borrower, with a third of students in debt. The vast majority of borrowers are eligible to enter income-based repayment plans that limit their student loan payments to 10 percent of their discretionary income. College graduates also enjoy an additional $1 million in earnings over their lifetime, and the wage gap between those with a college degree and those without continues to grow.
Stevens notes that tuition has increased since he attended a state university in the 1960s.
Be Civil – It’s OK to have a difference in opinion but there’s no need to be a jerk. Princeton’s financial aid program is an outstanding (if rare) example: In 2014-15, the average grant covered 100% of tuition for freshman receiving financial aid. The experiment will test whether requiring additional loan counseling is effective in boosting academic outcomes and helping students manage their debt.
Beyond those details, the LendEDU report also delves into which states have the biggest and smallest average student loan debt totals. State averages for student debt in 2015 ranked from a low of $18,772 per borrower in Utah, to a high of $36,864 per borrower in CT. The University of OR had the lowest percentage of students who borrow, at just over half. Overall, students in eastern states experienced the highest debt loand and those in the west, the lowest. Corban and Concordia Universities had the highest proportion of graduates with debt, at an estimated 84 percent. Figures rounded to nearest dollar.
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The loan counseling experiment builds on years of work by the Administration to help ease the burden of student loan debt. LendEDU licensed the data from Peterson’s for this report. The results may surprise you. That ranked the state’s college students ninth most-indebted in the nation.
