Debt to Degree 

Debt (mostly the debt ceiling) has been all over the news for months. But a new Education Sector Chart You Can Trust, due out tomorrow, highlights another form of debt—student loans. Today, the borrowing that students have taken on to finance their higher education is at an all-time high, recently passing credit card debt in total volume.
 
The debt problem is compounded by a college completion problem: barely half of the students who start college get a degree within six years, and graduation rates at less-selective colleges often hover at 25 percent or less. In combination, drop-outs and debt are a major threat to the nation’s ability to help students become productive, well-educated citizens.
 
The federal government has tracked these issues separately by calculating for each college the total number of degrees awarded, the percentage of students who graduate on time, and the percentage of students who default on their loans. And, while each of these statistics provides valuable information, none shows a complete picture.
 
In Debt to Degree: A New Way of Measuring College Success, authors Kevin Carey and Erin Dillon have created a new, comprehensive measure, the "borrowing-to-credential ratio." For each college, they’ve taken newly available U.S. Department of Education data showing the total amount of money borrowed by undergraduates and divided that sum by the total number of degrees awarded. The results are revealing — offering a more complete way for the public to measure thevalue of college. |  Send Me a Copy!