The cumulative educational debt of postsecondary students

Concerns about the increasing levels of debt incurred by postsecondary education students have been expressed with growing frequency in the past several years, particularly with regard to the borrowing by graduate and professional level students. This paper reviews and assesses what has recently been reported on the levels of debt being accumulated by postsecondary students, what various analyses have concluded is the threshold for manageable debt, and what the results are when educational debt manageability thresholds are applied to current levels of student debt. nThe general findings of the paper are that: (1) the data on student borrowing are very limited; (2) the largest amounts of money are being borrowed by professional level students, particularly those in medicine and law; (3) it is not clear how burdensome these levels of debt are; and (4) the manageable debt burden thresholds have a number of serious problems and, at best, provide only crude measures of the extent to which students incur unmanageable levels of debt.,CRS 84-585 EPW,"March 19, 1984.",SuDoc# LC 14. 18/3