The price of withdrawl: college dropouts struggle to payoff loans

Student loans may become harder to pay off for college dropouts, who now earn 37 percent less than those who graduate, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal.

In 2005 there were 1.8 million borrowers of student loans. Of those, 58 percent have not yet graduated, and 59 percent have already defaulted or are delinquent on their loans.

It's not that those who graduate are promised wonderful prospects. Some 1.9 million college graduates were unemployed in October, according to the Department of Labor. That's about half of young graduates.

But college graduates have a lower unemployment rate of 4.1 percent compared to those who drop out, which is 9.8 percent.

"Students who don't graduate with some sort of credential or degree, they are the ones who are having the most problems repaying," Alisa Cunningham, one of the study's authors, told the Wall Street Journal. "It doesn't even have to be a really high amount of loans. It's just that they get in trouble because they have their daily lives they have to pay for."

EMAIL: alovell@deseretnews.com