Posted on 07/01/2014 8:46:26 AM PDT by Citizen Zed
When the subject of student loan debt comes up, it's a near certainty that hand-wringing will soon follow.
With more than $1 trillion outstanding in student loans, and millennials holding off on everything from buying stocks to taking out mortgages, small wonder that people are worried.
Yet a new study from the Brookings Institution suggests things may not be all that bad—or at least not in crisis mode you expect.
About a quarter of the increase in total student debt is the result of more students going to college and graduate school, the study found, using the Survey of Consumer Finances administered by the Federal Reserve Board.
Average student debt has certainly risen, with nearly a quarter of students reporting debt of $20,000 or more in 2010, up from "a trivial number of households" two decades earlier, the researchers found. But incomes have risen as well for college graduates, and even, to a lesser extent, for those who only attended some college.
The upshot of those dual trends is that median monthly debt payments as a share of monthly income for people with student loans ranged between 3 and 4 percent every year between 1992 and 2010.
The results run so counter to the prevailing wisdom that even the researchers at Brookings were taken aback.
There may not be mountains of Ph.D-wielding junior professors with $100,000 in debt—just 2 percent of borrowers had that much in loans, the study found—but plenty of Americans are struggling with their education borrowing.
(Excerpt) Read more at mob.cnbc.com ...
Microsoft is no longer the innovators they once were back in 80s. They have been playing catch up since about 1994.
They were some what coming back from 2000 to 2010, but since about 2012 it's been downhill again. Think about the Microsoft phone and tablet has been a disaster. Windows 8 launch a disaster.
The last good product from Microsoft is Windows 7, but that even took a long time to come out.
Sorry wrong post...
If you were to give each of these students in debt 2 million bucks, the vast majority of them would be flat broke and in debt again in less than 5 years. It isn’t their student debt that is holding them back.
OR, these bums can work for a while, save some money, go to school, and NOT have so much debt.
Wow, I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I figured that one out!
Now that Caliph Baraq has produced this gravy deal where you make trivial payments for 10 yrs and then the debt is erased (assuming you work for govt) watch the numbers soar.
Their poster boy is the Occupy Wall Street brat who had run up over a $100,000 debt majoring in puppetry and somehow thought that it was society’s fault that he was unable to get a job in his field sufficient to pay off the debt and live well.
Yes - for most people, but a little known fact is that children of members of congress are not required to repay their loans. How's that for exempting yourself!
This study had many methodological flaws that the commenters on the NY Times discussion picked up. Brookings replied to some of these critiques in a follow-up.
Here is the original NY Times article:
Here is the followup:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/26/upshot/q-and-a-about-student-debt.html?rref=upshot
I would particularly call your attention to this question, and Brookings’ answer:
Q: Because you looked at households, your analysis excluded some college graduates still living with their parents, correct? Walk us through your thinking here.
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