A new report from the Student Borrower Protection Center: Disparate Debts: How Student Loans Drive Racial Inequality Across American Cities, can be found in full on their website.  CLICK HERE

Key Findings:

  • Across these cities, Black and Latinx borrowers take on a greater debt burden to finance higher education, with many of the largest and fastest-growing student loan balances found in majority-Black communities.
  • Borrowers in different areas of the same city face hugely disparate levels of distress on their loans. These disparities closely track the racial makeup of the neighborhoods where borrowers live. In San Francisco, for example, the rate of student loan delinquency is over 7.5 times higher in areas with the largest minority populations than the whitest areas.
  • Student Loan Defaults are Concentrated in Minority-Majority Areas

Taken together, this research confirms that the cost of America’s student debt crisis falls disproportionately on Black and Latinx communities. Further, the implications of the unequal rates of student loan distress can have ripple effects across borrowers’ financial lives and their communities. These effects include negative credit reporting, wage garnishment, tax refund withholding, and federal benefit offsets—as well as difficulties securing employment, renting apartments, and accessing credit. Taken together, these can cause severe economic hardship and reinforce systemic disparities.

View the press release HERE.