The Student Loan Landscape

Brown, Meta; Haughwout, Andrew F.; Lee, Donghoon; Scally, Joelle; Van der Klaauw, Wilbert

Discussion Paper

The Student Loan Landscape

Abstract: Student loans have recently attracted a huge amount of attention from the press and policymakers. In this post, the first in our three-part series this week, we’ll use our Consumer Credit Panel dataset, a representative sample drawn from anonymized Equifax credit data, to describe the landscape of the outstanding U.S. student loan portfolio. Much of our discussion will address updates to several graphs that we’ve presented before, most recently in a 2014 staff report, “Measuring Student Debt and Its Performance”; readers can find more detail there. We’ll also update some earlier analysis of the broader effects that student debt may be having on the economy, including data through 2014 on the relationship between student loans and mortgages that we discussed in a blog post last spring.

Keywords: household debt; student loans;

JEL Classification: D1;