Going Behind the Numbers of Student Loan Debt

The student loan market is the second-largest debt pool in the U.S.; and since it’s also the fastest-growing collections market, it may soon become the biggest pool nationwide. This means that if your collection agency isn’t involved in the student loan market, then you’re missing out on your share of a $1 trillion pot.

While there are more students graduating from college, more of those young adults are graduating with debt. The 57 percent of bachelor’s degree recipients from public four-year colleges who graduated with debt from 2011-12 borrowed an average of $25,000. That’s 22 percent – or $4,500 more compared to the average debt of the 52 percent of graduates who had education debt ten years prior.

According to data from the New York Federal Reserve Bank, the share of 25-year-old Americans with student debt was 43 percent in 2012, compared to 25 percent in 2003; in the same amount of time, the average loan balance rose 91 percent, from $10,649 to $20,326.

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