Good News: The Student Loan Bubble* Has Been Canceled

(* Not to be confused with the student loan crisis being canceled. That was so~ last June.)

The other good news on this election day is that whenever Reuters says it’s conducted an “analysis,” you’re excused from taking it seriously. In “U.S. student debt burden falling more on top earners, easing bubble fears,” the news agency boldly tells us:

[T]he analysis of the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances [SCF], a triennial survey published in September with 2013 data, makes it clear that heavy borrowing is usually rewarded with big salaries.

Clear, eh? The article’s only real evidence that student loan debt leads to higher incomes is the word of higher ed cheerleader Sandy Baum, so that’s just an argument from authority.

The increased concentration of debt among the well-paid should ease concerns that the surge in debt is a wider economic threat.

This is a normative statement that doesn’t cite anyone who says that student debt is a “wider economic threat,” much less what that means. It’s also misleading to say that the debt is increasingly concentrated among the well paid. Although the article states that “over the past two decades the young with higher incomes have gone from owing less of the debt than the average household to owing considerably more,” over the past decade things aren’t really that different. The proportion of young households (those headed by someone between the ages of 20 and 40) earning more than $60,000 doesn’t hold any more of their age group’s student loan debt than before.

Reuters could have found that out by discussing the Fed’s write-up of its own findings. The word for this is “reporting.” Behold, Box 10 on page 27 of the Fed’s “Changes in U.S. Family Finances from 2010 to 2013: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances” (pdf).

Notice that in 2013 more than twenty percent of student debt held by young households fell into the less-than-$30,000 bracket, about twice as much as twelve years earlier. This doesn’t ease my concerns that the surge in debt is a wider economic threat, but if Reuters doesn’t have to define that, I don’t have to either. Nevertheless, you can imagine why I think it’s probably not a good thing that a growing slice of an expanding debt pie is falling on people with less than $30,000 in income.

And for those of you who think I overindulge on MS Excel graphs, gaze upon the Fed’s “SCF Chartbook,” and weep for your wretched souls while scrolling through all 1,260 browser-crashing charts therein (pdf—if you dare: Education installment loans are from pages 1083-1118).

Here are two that are relevant to Reuters‘ general argument that student loan debt isn’t a problem because most of it is held by high-income households:

These aren’t young households—you can find them on pages 1089 and 1090—but I think these charts make it clear (in the way that quoting Sandy Baum does not) that student debt is a problem for low-income households: A fraction of the student loan mountain can still be an unscalable crag.

For example, the median household in the 20th income percentile (from page 7) has made about $11,000-$13,000 over the last twenty-five years, but the percentage of such households holding student loan debt has doubled while their median debt has nearly tripled. The median middle-income household (40th to 59.9th percentiles) made less than $47,000 in 1989 and 2013. (Ouch.) That household in that income bracket saw its student loans grow by more than $10,000, and the percentage of student-debt-holding middle-incomes households nearly tripled. I don’t know what the income numbers are when you exclude non-student-loan debtor-households, but it’s unlikely to be much higher.

Back to our young earners, in 1989 17.1 percent of households headed by people under 35 had a median $5,400 in student loan debt. In 2013, the median balance for 41.7 percent of those households owed $17,200. Their median incomes have declined (page 10).

Undaunted, the article throws out just about every other argument for student loan debt that I’ve seen: the college premium, the economists who believe the supply of college graduates isn’t keeping up with demand for high tech jobs, and the claim that amputating graduate borrowing from the total makes the problem “almost” go away. Ooh, those irresponsible grad students! The only things Reuters didn’t do was find someone to tell us that all we need to do is “fix” IBR or that it’s all the for-profits’ fault.

Although the article finds the column inches for the high student loan delinquency rate, it neglects to cite the Education Department’s Federal Student Loan Portfolio (portfolio by loan status) data showing that barely half of the $1.1 trillion of federal student loan debt is in active repayment while 17 percent is categorized as in-school or in grace period. As the Fed’s report says of debts in deferments due to tough economic times, “[T]hese debts will eventually have to be repaid.”

Right. Just don’t tell that to last June’s student debt crisis slayer, Beth Akers, whom Reuters quotes:

“Debt is a tool. If anything, I’d want to encourage lower income people to take more advantage of it.”

Yeah, and look where it’s getting them.