Analysis and Methodology for State Budget/Student Loan Debt Evaluation
2-25-2021
State Budget Data:
State Budget Data was taken directly from a Ballotpedia publication, which utilized the most recent data (2017) provided by the National Association of State Budget Officers. The data was used as published.
Student Loan Data:
Source data was taken from the Department of Education’s Dataset: loan portfolio by state (and loan size). We subtracted loans in both the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico out of the data. “Other”, and “Not Reported” loans were distributed among the states proportional to their populations. This revealed an outstanding loan portfolio totalling $1.551 Trillion.
For private student loans, we assumed a total value of $140 Billion after reviewing several disparate data sources.
In addition, there is a significant loan volume in the country where people refinanced their federal student loans with private banks through home-equity, home mortgage, or other private lending instruments. The cumulative value of loans refinanced this way is not known.
Also, as noted on the Finaid website, there may be a significant amount of interest for federal loans that is not being reported by the Department of Education. This could increase the portfolio value by “6-7%”, which could mean as much as $109 Billion. Because neither of these missing data (private refinancing and unreported interest) can be found, we assumed a cumulative value of $100 Billion, and distributed this among the states proportional to state population.
This gave a total student debt figure of about $1.8 Trillion, distributed as shown in the figure below.
We believe that our final estimate for total student loan debt is reasonably accurate, and could be far below the true value depending upon the extent of unreported private refinancing, and unreported interest for federal loans.
Note: The Department of Education has been contacted to determine precisely how much interest is not being reported, but have yet to receive a response.
FULL STATE LISTINGS;
State Budget vs. Total Student Debt Federal Student Loans Only
State Budget vs. Total Student Debt Federal Student Loans Only
