Student Loan Debt Has Doubled In NYC In Past Decade, Study Shows

NEW YORK, NY – The amount of student loan debt owed in New York City has more than doubled in the past ten years to a staggering $8.94 billion. Across the country, an all-time high of $1.36 trillion was owed to lenders in the third quarter of 2018.

A study by the consumer credit reporting agency Experian showed that New York City residents had owed $4.4 billion for the educations 10 years ago.

Nationwide, student loan debt represents the second-largest credit debt for Americans, falling behind mortgage loans. Nationally, there are more than 145 million outstanding student loan accounts spread across 43.2 million borrowers.

On average, American carry $22,600 per person in student loan debt, a 20 percent increase since 2015, according to the Experian analysis.

The increase in New York City was the biggest in the country, followed by Los Angeles with $5.1 billion, compared to $2.4 billion in 2008, and student loan debt in Chicago grew to $4.8 billion from $2.2 billion a decade earlier.

The cities with the lowest loan debt were Las Vegas, Nevada, with $755 million; Sacramento, California, with $823 million; and Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas, with $1 billion.

Americans Largely Paying Back Their Loans

Though student loan debt has reached record levels, borrowers are for the most part making their payments on time. Only about $77 billion in loans — nearly 5.7 percent of them — were delinquent in the third quarter of 2018 and, of those, the majority were 90 or more days past due, Experian said.

Since 2015, the number of delinquent loans shrank by 4 percent and delinquency rates decreased by 50 percent on loans that were 30 to 59 days past due. For loans that were 60 to 90 days past due, delinquency rates shrank by 48 percent.

In fact, Experian said, the only loans that didn’t show dramatic change were those that were 90 days past due, which went down by just 2 percent. Delinquency rates increased in only two areas since 2015— the South Atlantic and the South Central regions, where 9.6 percent and 9.4 percent of accounts were at least 30 days past due, respectively.

Experian said low unemployment rates may be boosting Americans’ ability to make good on their student loan payments.

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