NASFAA Mention: Six Figures in Debt for a Master's Degree
"Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is betting big on transparency as a solution for high student debt burdens. New data on program-level borrowing that the Education Department released last month through the College Scorecard sheds light on how student debt works and what fields have the highest loan volumes. However, many higher education experts remain skeptical that putting more information into the hands of the public will affect enrollment decisions or tuition prices, especially for the graduate programs where borrowers take out the most loan debt," Inside Higher Ed reports.
"That’s in part because there’s little evidence students themselves will use the data, they said, and because price isn't the only factor for students who are choosing a graduate program.
The release of the student borrowing numbers is the first step in the administration’s plans to beef up program-level information on the Scorecard, a consumer tool launched by the Obama administration. Data on earnings associated with college programs is expected later this summer.
The Scorecard information is preliminary and hasn't been checked by institutions themselves. But it to a large extent confirms what researchers already knew about student debt. Graduate programs, it shows, have the highest volumes of student loan debt. It also highlights a number of outlier programs with especially high debt numbers.
... But many colleges already are taking a hard look at borrowing on the program level, said Justin Draeger, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.
Those institutions often face a financial conundrum, he said, because of how program subsidies work on campus. High-priced graduate programs in effect often subsidize the affordability of undergraduate degrees.
'The financial model at many universities is so complex that when you start pulling on one thread, it’s awfully hard to disentangle it from all the other programs and threads,' Draeger said.
The other reality for colleges is that they have little control over how much students borrow for graduate degrees. For example, students can borrow up to the full cost of attendance using PLUS loans. Those factors, Draeger said, make potential accountability schemes based on student borrowing an especially challenging proposition.
'These are really complicated things to try to address through policy, which is maybe why we fall back on consumer information disclosure,' he said."
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Publication Date: 6/3/2019
