Debt Burden: A Comparison of 1992-93 and 1999-2000 Bachelor's Degree Recipients a Year After Graduating

This report uses the 1994 and 2001 Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study (B&B) to compare the borrowing patterns of 1992–93 and 1999–2000 bachelor's degree recipients. It also examines their repayment situations and resulting debt burdens (defined as monthly loan payments as a percentage of monthly salary income) a year after they graduated. Members of the earlier cohort finished their undergraduate borrowing before the changes in the Stafford loan program were implemented, and most members of the later cohort would have done all of their borrowing under the new rules. The major finding of the analysis was that although both the percentage of graduates who had borrowed for their undergraduate education and the average total amount borrowed (adjusting for inflation) increased, the median debt burden (as defined in the previous paragraph) a year after graduating was about the same for both cohorts.

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