Utah's college graduates have less debt than peers but struggle anyway

When Michael Robins was halfway through earning his degree in architecture at the University of Utah in 2008, his professors told him that 2010 would be a great year to finish school and find employment.

"Don't worry," they said. "Things will be picking up by then."

But when Robins graduated with his bachelor's degree this May — and $40,000 of school debt — the job market didn't look much better. It used to be that students in architecture could get jobs at prospective firms while they were in grad school, but not now. Very few are employed, Robins says, and some, like him, are working for free on top of going to more school full-time.

"Honestly, I question myself a lot, thinking, 'What am I doing?' And I'm accruing so much debt I don't know how I'm going to get out of it," said Robins, who's now planning to finish his master's degree at the U. in 2012. "But I love doing what I'm doing. You just hope that if you are good at what you do, you can also make a good living, too. I just have faith that things will hopefully work out if I'm smart."

Robins is one of many students facing an economy with unprecedented levels of unemployment for recent college graduates who have mounting student debt. According to a recent study by The Project on Student Debt, graduates in 2009 finished with 6 percent more loans than graduates the year before. In Utah, almost 40 percent of students who graduated in 2009 had an average of $12,860 in debt.

The good news is that students in Utah graduate from college with the lowest average amount of debt in the nation. Only one other state has a smaller percentage of students who graduate with debt. In fact, Utah students graduated with less debt in 2009 than their counterparts did in 2008 or 2007, according to the study. But debt, a dismal economy and increasing tuition costs are still taking their toll.

Administrators at BYU have noticed a spike over the last 18 months of seniors not graduating. The school has earned accolades over the years for its low costs and low debt rate for graduating students — U.S. News and World Report ranked it fourth in the country in 2009 for low debt — but students are still showing signs of hesitance to leave campus.

Some are adding more classes to their transcripts to prolong leaving school and some are leaning toward gaining an additional degree — and potentially more debt — to avoid facing the job market. A lot of it is caused by fear that may not be totally justified, says Vaughn Worthen, manager of BYU's career services department.