Document Type
Thesis
First Faculty Advisor
Leila Zbib
Keywords
student loans; debt; postgraduate life
Rights Management
CC-BY
Abstract
College tuition has been steadily increasing in America throughout the past two decades as demand for a higher education has continued to rise. A college education is invaluable and is inevitably essential in obtaining a successful career. As a result, more and more students have been depending on student loans to finance their way through college. The average college student loan debt has reached about $30,000 per student upon graduation nowadays. Because of these skyrocketing debt amounts, several life goals and aspirations have been impacted, including future employment, further enrollment, family formation, homeownership, and net worth. The objective of this project is to determine where there are significances between student loan debt and postgraduate life decisions, specifically continued education, homeownership, and family formation. The main purpose is to further add to existing data explaining the burdens of college loan debt and how something as simple as obtaining an education can be so impactful on one’s finances and life decisions. A survey was conducted among Bryant University alumni where the data was used to run various regression and t-test models to determine the correlations between student loan debt and postgraduate decisions. As a result, it was determined that student loan debt does in fact negatively impact one’s decision to pursue postgraduate enrollment and homeownership, however, family formation has proven to be not impacted by loans, although, this could be a result of many other factors.
