Student Debt and the Class of 2007

Today we released our third annual report on average student debt at the national, state and individual college level. We found that college seniors who graduated in 2007 carried six percent more student loan debt than the class of 2006, while starting salaries for recent graduates rose just three percent in the same period. Based on data reported by hundreds of four-year colleges across the country, the national average student loan debt for 2007 graduates is $20,098, although we estimate that the actual average is higher -- $21,900 - because of flaws in the available data.

In Student Debt and the Class of 2007, we rank the states according to the average debt of graduates and the proportion of graduates with debt. We also discuss data issues, methodology, and the reasons there is such a broad range of debt levels across states and institutions.

EconomicDiversity.org has also been updated with the new student debt data and other data on diversity and affordability for the 2006-07 academic year. The site now has 311 data elements, covering five years of data, for over 3000 institutions of higher education.

Read the report

Visit the interactive map with all reported data for states and institutions.

(This message was sent to the Project on Student Debt mailing list on October 22, 2008.)