Student debt, a new Gallup report shows, is making it harder for young people to reach key life milestones.
According to a Gallup survey of over 14,000 adults, over 70% of people say student debt has “delayed major life events” including moving out of their parents’ home, getting married, and having a child.
Strikingly, there is little variance across demographics in these findings. An identical 70% of black and white respondents said student debt had delayed at least one life event. For Hispanics, it was 72%.
The largest variance was between men and women, and it was women who reported less interference from student debt, with just 64% of women reporting debt-related delays compared to 76% of men. This is an interesting finding since women heavily outnumber men both on college campuses and in college degrees awarded. It could be a residual effect from the fact that women perform better in college and are more likely to graduate than men.
Some may look at these results and think they support the idea of debt relief for student borrowers. If student debt is holding people back from achieving important goals, wouldn’t getting rid of that debt help everyone?
But that would be, at best, a temporary solution that would only make the underlying problem worse.
The real problem is that existing federal subsidies are driving up the price of higher education while leaving more cost-effective alternatives, like vocational training, underfunded. Over the past 20 years, our highly subsidized higher education system has created more college graduates than the United States economy has created jobs that need a college degree.
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Not everyone wants to go to college, nor does everyone need a college degree, especially if pursuing that degree will leave them with debt that will make the rest of their goals harder to reach.
Instead of throwing good money after bad through college debt bailouts that only benefit a privileged few, we should make it easier for firms to select young, talented workers and give them the training they need to be productive members of society.