Student loans climb: top 10 states with the highest college debt

Increasing numbers of American college seniors are collecting not just their degrees at graduation, but thousands of dollars worth of student loans as well. Seventy-one percent of the class of 2012 graduated with student loan debt, up from 68 percent in 2008, according to a recent study from The Institute for College Access and Success (TICAS). But when it comes to debt levels, not all states are created equal. Read on for the 10 states with the highest average debt levels for loan-carrying students upon graduation, according to TICAs. Can you guess which state had the highest? 

Melanie Maxwell/The Ann Arbor News/AP/File
In this photo from on Martin Luther King Jr. Day Jan. 20, 2014, members of the student movement Being Black at the University of Michigan, or #BBUM, rally on the steps of Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, Mich. Student loans for UM graduates averaged $27,815 in 2012.

10. Michigan

Melanie Maxwell/The Ann Arbor News/AP/File
In this photo from on Martin Luther King Jr. Day Jan. 20, 2014, members of the student movement Being Black at the University of Michigan, or #BBUM, rally on the steps of Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, Mich. Student loans for UM graduates averaged $27,815 in 2012.

Average debt: $28,840

Students with debt upon graduation: 62 percent

In Michigan, three-quarters of graduating seniors at Lawrence Technological University finished school with student loans, at an average debt of $41,529 per student. That average was nearly $4,600 more than the reported debt load for students at Ferris State University.

Seventy-one percent of the class of 2012 graduated with student loan debt, up from 68 percent in 2008, according to a recent study from the Institute for College Access and Success (TICAS)

The average debt load per student also varied widely depending on what kind of school students attended – about $39,950 for students at for-profit schools and $25,500 for graduates of public institutions. Non-profit college debt was roughly in the middle, at an average of $32,300 per student.

The US is also divided geographically when it comes to student debt – the states with the lowest student debt, such as New Mexico and California, are generally in the west. By contrast, five East Coast states – New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Maine, Delaware and New Jersey – were home to some of the country’s highest rates of student debt.

TICAS based its reporting on data licensed from the Peterson’s educational publishing company, which in turn was sourced from information voluntarily released by the schools. (The study didn’t include data from North Dakota because there wasn’t enough to work with.) The average debt figures on the list represent the average debt among loan-carrying students. 

Federal surveys collect data on student debt every four years, and noted that colleges and universities aren’t required to report student debt figures, according to TICAS.

1 of 10

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.