Studies show student debt can hurt communities, and averages 60% more in rural areas than the rest of the nation

Percentage of income going to student loan payments in 2016 (Map is from this study.)

A pair of new studies show how the burden of student-loan debt hurts rural communities.

Young adults from rural areas average about 60 percent more student-loan debt than their suburban and urban counterparts, and it's not because they're consistently borrowing more money, according to a study published in Rural Sociology. The trend is particularly pronounced among women. At age 25, about 48 percent of rural college attendees carry student debt, compared to 38% of suburban and 37% of urban attendees. Rural students also tend to have more debt: an average of $19,680, compared to $16,780 for urban and suburban attendees.

"Rural college-goers’ higher debt can be partly explained by their parents tending to have lower incomes, lower wealth, and less education compared to their non-rural counterparts. Rural college-goers’ higher rates of migration during college also plays a significant role," study author Alec P. Rhodes, a Ph.D. sociology candidate at Ohio State, told The Daily Yonder's Kristi Eaton.

Rhodes said women may have more debt because the best-paying rural jobs that don't require a college degree tend to be dominated by men. "As a result, rural women may feel greater pressure than rural men to take on debt to attend college," he said. "These combined 'penalties' of being a woman and having a rural background may contribute to especially high student debt levels among rural women."

Student-loan debt has a broad impact, argues a study in the International Journal of Community Well-Being. "Higher levels of student debt are generally related to lower levels of homeownership and higher levels of rental stress, or people that have trouble making rent payments," authors Jackson Parr and Steven Deller report in The Daily Yonder. "The problems created by too much student debt are two-fold, as people may not have any room to take on mortgage debt, driving them toward rent. With so many people driven to rent from a limited amount of available housing, rent goes up and squeezes the student debt payers even more."

In sum, student-loan debt remains smaller than Americans' $4.1 trillion of credit debt or $15.5 trillion mortgage debt, but it has grown significantly in the past two decades as tuition has increased. "From 2006, consumer-credit debt grew approximately 70% and mortgage debt grew by 24%, but student-loan debt grew by 232%," Parr and Deller write. "The Consumer Price Index increased only 21.1%. Although this may indicate more people attending college, the percentage of high-school graduates attending college grew by just four percentage points (65.8% in 2006 to 69.7% in 2016), an increase of 38% in terms of absolute number of students. Meanwhile, debt loads increased. Based on analysis by the Institute for College Access and Success (2018) of survey data from American four-year universities and colleges, the average student debt level increased from $18,650 in 2004 to $29,650 in 2016."

Rhodes, the author of the first study, speculated that cancellation of federal student debt, lately a hot-button political topic, would disproportionately benefit rural students. He told Eaton the nation should address long-term wage stagnation that has made college harder to pay for, and believes states should invest more in higher education to make college more affordable.