In the federal government’s annual status report on U.S. education outcomes, researchers affiliated with the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) have put a special emphasis on higher education and employment and on the growth of federal student financial aid.
The Condition of Education 2013, which was released today by NCES and includes both K-12 and higher education outcomes, documents that nearly 30 percent of 20- to 24-year-olds are neither employed nor attend school. Employment rates are higher among young adults with at least a bachelor’s degree in comparison to their peers. For college graduates, the employment rate is 87 percent compared to 48 percent for those who did not finish high school.
Over the last decade, the federal government has increased financial aid to students, amounting to $146 billion in 2011. The report says that grant aid, mostly in the form of Pell grants, nearly quadrupled between 2000 and 2011. And disbursed student loans have grown by 150 percent, reaching $109 billion in 2011, according to the report. The growing demand for student loans, along with lending policy changes, has resulted in more than $500 billion of student loans owned by the federal government.
Total student loan debt, which is the only form of loan debt that has increased since the recession, in 2012 stands at nearly $1 trillion and delinquency on student loan debt has been increasing, according to the NCES.
“Today’s economy puts young graduates in a difficult position,” NCES Commissioner Jack Buckley said in a statement. “A college diploma no longer guarantees a direct pathway to the middle class, making it harder to justify the expense of a degree. Yet, when we look at the low employment rates for those who have only completed high school or less, we see how hard it is to get a good job without some type of higher education.”
Thomas D. Snyder, the NCES program manager for annual reports, said the special emphasis on higher education financing and employment represents an effort by the NCES to place education in a larger context than is typically done in The Condition of Education report. In addition to higher education financing and the young adult employment rates, this year’s report examines academic “redshirting” of kindergartners, or purposefully delaying a child’s entry into kindergarten, and rural education in the U.S.
“The student loan debt is the second largest type of debt held by consumers, second only to home mortgages. So, I think that the student loan industry has really grown over time and represents a growing percentage of the debt that consumers hold,” Snyder says.
