Student-loan debt soars

Higher education is on hold for Max Hunsaker.

It's not that the 24-year-old Brigham Young University graduate doesn't want to get a master's degree. He simply can't afford it.

And while he dreams of someday working in public policy, he's now putting in his hours as a business consultant to get a jump on the $15,000 in student debt he has accrued in the past four years.

Like Hunsaker, the average Utah student is also carrying thousands of dollars in debt after earning a four-year degree. Student debt is at an all-time high in Utah, and students are in for another shock come July 1 when interest rates on existing loans jump by 1.84 percent.

Rates on new loans issued after July 1 will also climb, to a fixed 6.8 percent from the current 5.3 percent.

That pending hike has Utah education leaders worried that the growing student-debt burden may be forcing students to bypass lower-income careers like teaching and social work to more quickly pay off their loans.

Perhaps even more worrisome, the rising interest rates, coupled with higher tuition, may be enough to price some Utah students out of an education altogether.

"You have to go on to get a graduate degree to be marketable, but I didn't feel comfortable with the debt I already had to get further into debt," Hunsaker said. "I want to have it paid off. It's kind of the motivation for all the decisions I'm making right now." Nationally, about two-thirds of students at four-year colleges have student debt, averaging around $19,000, according to the national Project on Student Debt. In Utah, the average for a bachelor's degree is about $14,790 — a 45 percent increase since 1995.

"There's some growing trends that because of the costs, people have to look at what is the major that's going to help me pay this back, which is not especially good for society," said David Feitz, associate executive director of the Utah Higher Education Assistance Authority. "If somebody has $80,000 in debt and they have an MBA degree, we don't worry too much about them. But if they're going into elementary education, those borrowers are the ones we have concerns about."

At the same time, the number of loans processed through Utah's Higher Education Assistance Authority has grown by more than 85 percent in the past decade, to a high of 100,760 loans in 2005. While that number does not indicate individual borrowers, it does show a surge in the volume of loans, Feitz added.

Feitz attributes that increase mostly to annual tuition hikes. Total tuition and fees at the University of Utah, for example, have shot up more than 60 percent in the past 10 years.