Student loan debt continues to grow but not because students are borrowing more. It's because their parents are, according to savingforcollege.com.
Its publisher and vice president of research, Mark Kantrowitz, analyzed data from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, which is conducted every four years. The data shows that the average debt of college graduates with bachelor's degrees increased only 1% from 2011-12 to 2015-16 — to $29,669 — but the average debt for Federal Parent PLUS loans grew slightly above 19% over the same period to $32,596.
Kantrowitz says the shift in borrowing from students to parents is due to students maxing out on loans, leaving parents to pick up the slack. The aggregate loan limit for federal student loans, known as Stafford loans, is $31,000 for students whose parents claim them as dependents and $57,500 for students independent of their parents.
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Bernice Napach
Bernice Napach is a senior writer at ThinkAdvisor covering financial markets and asset managers, robo-advisors, college planning and retirement issues. She has worked at Yahoo Finance, Bloomberg TV, CNBC, Reuters, Investor's Business Daily and The Bond Buyer and has written articles for The New York Times, TheStreet.com, The Star-Ledger, The Record, Variety and Worth magazine. Bernice has a Bachelor of Science in Social Welfare from SUNY at Stony Brook.
