Inside Higher Ed has a story about graduates still struggling to pay back their student loans–even as they have to pay for their own children’s educations:
Since 2005, 14 million more people have taken on student debt. The majority of borrowers still paying back their loans are in their 30s or older. And the average debt per borrower has steadily climbed, from $15,651 in the first quarter of 2005 to $24,301 in early 2012.
Despite the recent attention paid to recent college graduates burdened by six figures of debt and unable to find jobs, borrowers under 30 are doing better than most on paying back their loans. Only about 6 percent of them are more than 90 days late — the most serious form of delinquency — in making payments. Borrowers in their 40s, on the other hand, have a delinquency rate double that of their younger counterparts, at about 12 percent. …
Other older borrowers are in debt from paying for their children’s education. Parents who take out PLUS loans, federal loans intended for parents, can accumulate a high debt burden, said Heather Jarvis, a lawyer who works with student borrowers. “You see pretty alarming figures with how much even an individual person can borrow, and then you look at a parent borrower who may have more than one child,” said Jarvis, who said she recently counseled a single mother who took out PLUS loans for three children in college.
Other parents — including Jarvis and her husband, she said — are facing the prospect of paying for college for their children while still repaying student loans of their own, in some cases from graduate or professional school. The result can be a combination of old and new student debt for both generations.
Read more from TCF on student loan debt here.
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