Supplement to Price and Cost in Higher Education: Price

In Price and Cost in Higher Education: Price I discussed briefly debt load for graduate students.  This note adds a bit of detail to that discussion.

Kenneth Redd of the Council of Graduate Schools reports that in 2003-2004, 43% of minority students were taking out loans to finance their graduate study, with the average annual loan being about $19K.  Thirty four percent of white graduate students were taking out loans, averaging about $18K annually. Upon completing the doctorate, 65% of minority students had outstanding debt, with an average of $51,263, while 51% of white students had an average cumulative debt of $51,648.  These numbers are roughly twice as large as comparable numbers from a decade ago.

Bad as this situation seems, it is better than in some professional schools.  Equal Justice Works recently published a study of debt loads of graduating law students. They found that more than 80% of all law students borrow to support their education.  Upon graduation, students in public institutions had an average debt of $51K, while those from private institutions had an average debt of $79K. While these debt numbers are not prohibitive compared to the $135K median starting salary for an associate in a big law firm in a large city, they are overwhelming for someone looking at public interest law, where starting salaries are in the $36K-$44K range.  This is clearly a situation in which the cost of education is having a significant social impact.

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[Stephen Cook]

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