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An Economist's Perspective on Student Loans in the United States

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An Economist's Perspective on Student Loans in the United States ES Working Paper Series, September 2014 An Economist’s Perspective on Student Loans in the United States Susan Dynarski, Professor, University of Michigan; Nonresident Senior Fellow, the Brookings Institution; Faculty Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research Abstract In this paper, I provide an economic perspective on policy issues related to student debt in the United States. I lay out the economic rationale for government provision of student loans and summarize time trends in student borrowing. I describe the structure of the US loan market, which is a joint venture of the public and private sectors. I then turn to three topics that are central to the policy discussion of student loans: whether there is a student debt crisis, the costs and benefits of interest subsidies, and the suitability of an income-based repayment system for student loans in the US. I close with a discussion of the gaps in the data required to fully analyze and steer student-loan policy. * Comments welcome: dynarski@umich.edu. This paper was prepared for the 2014 East-West Center/Korean Development Institute Conference on a New Direction in Human Capital Policy. This research was partially supported by a grant from the Spencer Foundation. All views and errors are my own. I. Introduction Forty million people in the United States hold student debt totaling $1 trillion. While other forms of consumer credit declined during the Great Recession (see Figure 1), student debt continued to rise. As a result, student loans are now, after mortgages, the largest source of household debt, outstripping credit cards and auto loans. Figure 1: Trends in Non-Mortgage Consumer Debt Source: Lee (2013), based on data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. “HELOC” indicates home-equity lines of credit. Defaults on student debt also rose during the Great Recession.1 Seven million student borrowers are now in default, with more behind on their payments. 2 Proposed policy responses 1 The US Department of Education, which administers the federal loan programs, defines default. This definition has varied over time, hindering the creation of a consistent measure of borrower distress. At present, default indicates a borrower has not made a payment in 270 days; in the past, this window has been narrower. 1 have included reductions in interest rates, forgiveness of student debt, more flexible repayment plans and increased regulation of college prices. In the latest effort to respond to widespread policy concern that there is a student debt crisis, President Obama signed in June 2014 an executive order expanding eligibility for the Pay As You Earn program, which offers reduced payments to borrowers in financial distress. In this paper, I provide an economic perspective on policy issues related to student debt in the United States. I begin by laying out the economic rationale for government provision of student loans. I show time trends in student borrowing and describe the structure of the US loan market, which is a joint venture of the public and private sectors. I then turn to three topics that are central to the policy discussion of student loans: whether there is a student debt crisis, the costs and benefits of interest subsidies, and the suitability of an income-based repayment system for the US. I close with a discussion of the gaps in the data required to fully analyze and steer student-loan policy. To preview, I argue that there is no debt crisis: student debt levels are not large relative to the estimated payoff to a college education in the US. Rather, there is a repayment crisis, with student loans paid when borrowers’ earnings are lowest and most variable (Dynarski and Kreisman, 2013). As a result, there is a mismatch in the timing of the arrival of the benefits of college and its costs. Ironically, this mismatch is the very motivation for providing student loans in the first place. 2 There were 6.5 million borrowers in default as of the third quarter of 2013. See http://studentaid.ed.gov/sites/default/files/fsawg/datacenter/library/PortfoliobyLoanStatus.xls. 2 One solution is an income-based-repayment structure for student loans, with a longer window for repayment than the ten years that is currently the standard. While there exist income- based repayment options within the current system, few borrowers take them up. The administrative barriers to accessing these options are considerable, which may explain the low take-up rate. Further, the existing options do not adjust loan payments quickly enough to respond to the high-frequency shocks that characterize young people’s earnings, especially during a recession. A well-structured repayment program would insure borrowers against both micro and macro shocks. With an interest rate that appropriately accounts for the government’s borrowing and administrative costs, as well as default risk, this program could be self-sustaining. Designing such a program requires detailed data on individual earnings and borrowing, which are currently unavailable to researchers within and outside the government. If loan policy is to be firmly grounded in research, this gap in the data needs to be closed. II. The Economic Rationale for Government Loans to Students Education is an investment. Like all investments, education creates costs in the present but delivers benefits in the future. While students are in in school, expenses include both direct costs (tuition, books) and opportunity costs. Future benefits include increased earnings, improved health and longer life. To pay the current costs of their education, students need liquidity. In a business deal, a borrower would put up collateral in order to fund a potentially profitable investment. The collateral would typically include any capital goods used in the fledging enterprise, such as a building or machinery. Similarly, homeowners put up their home as collateral when they take out a mortgage. 3 Students cannot put themselves up for collateral: they cannot contractually commit to hand over their future labor to a lender in exchange for upfront cash, because indentured servitude is illegal. This is a market failure—there are good investments to be made, but private lenders cannot or are reluctant to make these loans, just as they are reluctant to make (and therefore demand higher interest rates for) other unsecured loans, such as credit cards. This market failure explains why governments play an important role in lending for education. While there have been occasional efforts to offer loans securitized by human capital (e.g., My Rich Uncle), none has moved beyond a small niche market. Indeed, the public sector of most developed countries and many developing countries provide loans to students. 3 Given their prevalence, there is remarkably little compelling evidence of the effect of student loans on educational investments. 4 Students choose to borrow, so estimating the effect of loans on outcomes is challenging: those who borrow likely differ from non-borrowers in ways that will bias naive comparisons of their educational attainment. A randomized trial would solve the selection problem, but there has been no experiment in which access to student loans is randomly manipulated.5 The best observational evidence comes from South Africa and Chile (Solis, 2012; Gurgand, et al, 2011). In these countries, students are offered loans only if they have a minimum credit score (South Africa) or test score (Chile). The papers that analyze these loan programs compare the college attendance of students right above and below these cutoffs, capturing the 3 In part, this is because it is very difficult for private parties to place a lien on (or confirm) individual earnings. By contrast, governments, through the income tax system, have the ability to both measure and collect from income. 4 See Dynarski and Scott-Clayton (2013) for a review of this evidence. 5 Field (2009) studies an experiment in which loan-repayment terms were randomly varied at a law school. 4 causal impact of loan availability. This research approach is referred to as “regression- discontinuity” design. In a well-designed regression-discontinuity study, that it is essentially random that someone ends up right above or right below the eligibility cutoff. A comparison of these two groups therefore yields a causal estimate of the effect of program eligibility. In Chile, right below the eligibility cutoff, 20 percent of students go to college. Right above, the figure is 40 percent. The difference — 20 percentage points — is the estimated causal effect of loan availability on college attendance for these students. The South African study reaches a similar conclusion. Right below the credit-score cutoff, 50 percent of students go to college, compared with 70 percent right above. Again, the estimated effect is a 20-percentage- point increase in college attendance. These are large effects, indicating that student loans make college possible for many students, at least in these two countries. While we would prefer to have evidence from the United States, these studies currently constitute the best available evidence on the causal impact of student loans on educational attainment. III. Trends in Student Borrowing As noted earlier, the stock of outstanding student debt now exceeds $1 trillion. The flow of debt has also increased, with annual borrowing doubling between 2001 and 2011 (from $56 billion to $113 billion, in constant 2011 dollars).6 Borrowing has increased, in part, because there are more students: college enrollment rose 32 percent in the decade between 2001 and 2011. 6 See Figure 6 in College Board (2012). 5 Figure 2: Aid per Full-Time-Equivalent Student Source: College Board (2013), Figure 1. But as the number of students increased, so too did annual borrowing per student, rising from $3,500 to $5,400, an increase of 54 percent. 7 This per-student increase in borrowing can be explained by one or both of two factors: an increase in the share of students taking out loans and/or an increase in the size of the loans borrowers take out.
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