… is higher than credit card debt in our country (hat tip: Wall Street Journal). How can this be?, you may ask, when the number of news stories on credit cards seem to vastly outweigh the corresponding reports on student loans. Well, yes, credit card stories seem to outnumber student loan stories by a ratio of about 15 to 1, according to StudentLoanJustice.org. How did this happen?
For a complete view of revolving consumer debt, check out the Federal Reserve’s Historical Consumer Credit data here. Graphically, it’s simple to see what happened with revolving credit:
- Revolving Consumer Credit, By Month (Federal Reserve)
If you dig around on the National Center for Education Statistics NPSAS site, you might find something approximating this data from the student loan side, but Mark Kantrowitz of finaid.org and fastweb.com estimates a whopping $829.8 billion. Time to turn up the number of stories on the student loans “crisis”? Time will tell. What do you think?
