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As students increasingly incur debt to finance their undergraduate education, there is heightened concern about the long-term implications of loans on borrowers, especially borrowers from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Drawing upon the concepts of cultural capital and habitus (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977), this research explores how student debt and social class intersect and affect individuals’ trajectory into adulthood. Based on 50 interviews with young adults who incurred $30,000–180,000 in undergraduate debt and who were from varying social classes, the findings are presented in terms of a categorization schema (income level by level of cultural capital) and a conceptual model of borrowing. The results illustrate the inequitable payoff that college and debt can have for borrowers with varying levels of cultural resources, with borrowers from low-income, low cultural capital backgrounds more likely to struggle throughout and after college with their loans.

The United States has been at the forefront of a global shift away from direct state funding of higher education and toward student loans, and student debt has become an issue of growing social concern. Why did student loans expand so much in the United States in the 1990s and 2000s? And how does organization theory suggest their expansion, and the growth of federal student aid more generally, might affect higher education as a field? In the 1960s and 1970s, policy actors worked to solve what was then a central problem around student loans: banks’ disinterest in lending to students. They did this so well that by 1990, a new field of financial aid policy emerged, in which all major actors had an interest in expanding loans. This, along with a favorable environment outside the field, set the stage for two decades of rapid growth. Organization theory suggests two likely consequences of this expansion of federal student loans and financial aid more generally. First, while (public) colleges have become less dependent on state governments and more dependent on tuition, the expansion of aid means colleges are simultaneously becoming more dependent on the federal government, which should make them more susceptible to federal demands for accountability. Second, the expansion of federal student aid should encourage the spread of forms and practices grounded in a logic focused on students’ financial value to the organization, such as publicly traded for-profit colleges and enrollment management practices.

The purpose of this chapter is to expand our understanding of the types of Black families that are using Parent PLUS, the types of institutions that rely on Parent PLUS the most, and the outcomes of students who use Parent PLUS to finance their first year of college.

I used descriptive analyses on several datasets collected by the U.S. Department of Education: IPEDS, BPS:04/09, and NPSAS.

The data revealed that (a) of Parent PLUS borrowers, greater shares of low-income Black families are borrowing than White families; (b) many institutions that serve Black students (including HBCUs) give out small amounts of institutional aid but also have much smaller endowments than non-Black-serving institutions; and (c) many families who borrow in their first year stop borrowing in their second year – and of those who stop borrowing, many transfer institutions.

Serving as a starting point in the conversation to Black families borrowing PLUS, this study is not causal and is limited by the unavailability of student-level data on PLUS borrowers. Estimating from nationally representative studies and examining Black-serving institutions is the next-best approximation.

The efforts to standardize financial aid award letters and provide better consumer information to parents must also include PLUS. Moreover, we need to find sustainable solutions for PLUS-reliant institutions to increase their capacity to provide institutional aid.

This chapter contributes to conversation around a controversial financial aid product that has been largely understudied, and in particular for Black families who borrow PLUS at the highest rates.

National student loans help solve the problem of tuition fees for students from poor families to a great extent. This paper aims to study the behavior of three main players involved in university student loans, namely, universities, banks and students and explores necessary conditions for promoting the steady development of student loans, as well as the sustainability of cooperation and coordination among players, thus promoting the further development of student loans.

First, from the perspectives of the three related players of banks, students and universities and their behavior, this paper establishes a three-player behavioral evolutionary game model, conducts a sustainable game analysis among the different players, and by replicating the dynamic equations with the Jacobian matrix solve the evolutionarily stable strategy. Finally, applying MATLAB tools, a sensitivity analysis of relevant impacting factors is carried out to explore the influencing mechanism of the sustainable development of student loans.

To achieve the mechanism of mutual coordination and cooperation between participants, banks need to be guided to actively issue student loans and conduct strict loan review. College students should be encouraged to establish good credit and strengthen penalties should be implemented for violations of regulations. Universities should be encouraged to help banks reduce information asymmetry, promote financial knowledge and student integrity education and promote the sustainable development of national student loans.

This research will help scholars better understand the interaction mechanism among universities, banks and students, and promote the sustainable development of national student loans.

The purpose of this paper is to measure the antecedents of students' attitude and the impact of students' attitude on the intention to repay study loans.

Primary data from 428 students in universities in Malaysia are collected and six constructs from theory are identified: perceptions that loan repayment will affect the quality of life after graduation; awareness of loan repayment issues created by media; perceptions towards loan agreement; parental influence; students' attitude towards loan repayment; and intention to repay loan. Structural equation modelling approach is adopted to analyze the data.

Constructs of parental influence and perceptions that loan repayment will affect the quality of life after graduation are found to have a direct relationship with students' attitude towards loan repayment; perceptions towards loan agreement is found to influence belief that loan repayment will affect the quality of life after graduation; and awareness of loan repayment issues created by media is found to affect parental influence. The relationship between students' attitude and intention is found to be statistically positive and significant.

The study has been conducted in aggregate form. Future studies could account for ethnic, gender, and regional differences.

The primary users of the results of this study would be the countries that provide education loans, and keen to cut down on student loan defaults.

The study is first of its kind to approach the issue of student loan defaults in a multi‐method manner and develop a comprehensive theoretical model that can be put to empirical test by future researchers.

Purpose – Drawing on a survey of over 1,000 Library and Information Science (LIS) professionals and over a dozen interviews, this chapter explores the student loan crisis from an LIS perspective and offers practical solutions for the field to decrease debt from LIS graduate programs, which has ballooned in recent years.

Design/Methodology/Approach – In April 2016, I sent a survey via email to approximately 10 library-affiliated listservs ranging from Code4Lib to the UMD iSchool discussion list. While I attempted to keep the reach small and controlled to only library-affiliated listservs, the survey link quickly spread to Twitter and other social media. The survey attracted 1,630 qualified responses and ran for two weeks in total. Using skip logic, all potential respondents who did not attend a library school (26 in total) were automatically disqualified. Email addresses were provided by 497 participants for interview post-survey. I received 215 partial responses. In September 2016, I conducted qualitative interviews with participants. Thirty-two telephone interviews were conducted extending for 15–20 minutes and I received 38 written questionnaires in response to my questions.

Findings – The findings are outlined in sub-chapter headings, including increased tuition does not equal increased aid, older students borrow less and take longer in programs tailored to their needs, new graduates unlikely to pay off their loans soon, and students with high undergraduate debt: a divided loan burden. Other findings include interview results, which are embedded within the chapter.

The final section offers recommendations for LIS programs to lessen the burden for students. These recommendations include better financing information and counseling for students; shorter, more flexible degree programs; apprenticeship model, more pathways for a paraprofessional to professional track; and expand public service loan forgiveness programs.

Originality/Value – This is the first comprehensive qualitative/quantitative study of the cost of library school as well as the debt burden for students. It provides actionable outcomes as well as an analytic framework through which to view the academic debt crisis. It features the voices of librarians from around the country as they struggle through a changing job market and increased monetary burden.

This paper aims to develop, refine and validate a multidimensional scale for measuring students’ attitude toward educational debt for higher studies in Punjab (India) and the impact of this attitude on the satisfaction of students.

The study uses interview and survey approach. The sample comprises 417 students from four public and four private universities of Punjab (India). Exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis have been used to develop and validate students’ attitude toward education loan scale (Morgado et al., 2017). Further, structural equation modeling (SEM) has been used to analyze the impact of factors of students’ attitude on their satisfaction.

The scale has been tested for both reliability and validity. Analysis has revealed six factors of students’ attitude toward educational debt, namely, economic empowerment, social empowerment, utility, procedural requirements, risk and stress. These, six independent variables and one dependent variable, i.e. students’ satisfaction, were entered into structural equation model. The structural equation model shows that procedural requirements, economic empowerment and utility have a positive, whereas stress has a negative and significant impact on the students’ satisfaction.

Education financing is a gigantic problem nowadays due to the high cost of self-financing courses in Punjab. To make higher education accessible to all students, education loan plays a vital role. Thus, the attitude of students is of great importance to policymakers to bring reforms in education loan scheme.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the foremost study for developing a validated tool to measure the students’ attitude toward educational debt in India.

This paper aims to investigate the determinants of taking out government‐funded student loans for university study in Australia.

The paper uses an ordered probit model to quantify the influence of the various factors which affect students' decisions on funding their tertiary study using student loans or through other means.

The study finds that the probability of taking out student loans for the full cost of university is largely influenced by students' socioeconomic status. Other major influences on this decision include students' demographic and university enrolment characteristics.

A limitation of the work is that only a neighbourhood (rather than an individual‐level) measure of socioeconomic status was available, and future research should seek to address this.

The research shows that the parameters of loan schemes do not seem to be able to over‐ride the influence that family background has on loan taking behaviour. That is, poor students use loans regardless of the parameters of the loans scheme in order to overcome short‐term credit constraints. In other words, these student loan schemes channel funds to those without other means of funding their higher education.

By showing the impact that income contingent provisions have on loan taking behaviour, the paper informs policy makers of potential impacts from modifying loans schemes to reflect this characteristic.

This study investigates the relation of bank loan delinquencies to Fed Survey delinquency data from 2003 to 2017. Bank-generated loans have lower delinquencies than all Fed Survey loan types. Survey mortgage and auto loan delinquencies are positively related to bank loan delinquencies indicating complimentary delinquency decisions for borrowers. Conversely, student loans delinquencies are negatively related to bank loans, consistent with borrowers substituting student loan payments for bank debt for the entire sample period. Student loan delinquencies are negatively related to per-capita bankruptcy, and all other types of debt have a positive relation. The relation between Fed Survey loan delinquencies and bank-generated loan delinquencies is time varying and changed after the financial crisis in 2008.

Seemingly Unrelated Regression is used to study delinquencies for three bank loan types and whether or not they are related to Fed Survey loan delinquencies. The sample is split into pre-financial crisis before 2008 and post-crisis after 2008.

Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) results show that bank delinquencies for second mortgages and “Other” loan types are consistently complementary to Fed Survey mortgage loan delinquencies. Fed Survey auto loans delinquencies are also consistent with a complimentary relation, and these results are largely driven by the relation after the financial crisis of 2008 since pre-crisis regression results are not significant for every dependent variable. Credit card loan delinquencies have a negative and substitute relation with bank-generated first mortgage loan delinquencies prior to the crisis in 2008, and with bank-generated second mortgages after the crisis. Conversely, student loan delinquencies from the Fed Survey are negatively and significantly related to bank mortgages for the entire sample period, but only with bank-generated first mortgages after 2008. The student loan delinquency results are consistent with income smoothing, on average, although this is not explicitly tested at the micro level since this study uses macro-level data and not borrower-specific data. These findings are also consistent with conventional wisdom that student loans provide “financial slack” and borrower flexibility.

A limiting factor is this study uses macro-level data and not borrower-specific data.

Empirical findings are consistent with prior research that student loans provide income smoothing and “financial slack,” and borrowers with payment challenges will pay other debt before student loans.

Borrowers in financial trouble tend to be delinquent for all debt, and more so for student debt.

To investigate whether Fed Survey delinquencies of auto loans, first mortgages, student loans and credit card loans from all sources have complementary or substitution effects with bank debt at a macro level. The study investigates whether bank debt follows “market trends” as a complementary effect, or if bank debt has a negative relation to other debt indicating a substitution effect.

This chapter explores the role of student loan debt in the lives of American students and graduates in Wisconsin, US. The total amount of student loan debt in the United States is now at a record high. While debt is considered an integral part of a “forced timeline” toward a greater good, namely the American Dream, it is at the same time a disciplinary mechanism binding individuals to their families in various ways. While most anthropological research on college students and debt has not focused explicitly on student loan debt, this chapter offers insight into a phenomenon currently affecting more than 44 million Americans.