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Trump

Tom Brenner

After years of working in higher education, Nicole Sparbanie had hit a wall. She enjoyed her job in student affairs, but she felt burned out and stuck.

So she sought out a master’s degree at New York University, thinking it could help open new doors. And it did: Within a year of graduating in 2021, Sparbanie landed a job as an analyst at a higher-education consulting firm.

“I’m not sure I would have been taken seriously in the interview process if I didn’t have a degree from NYU,” she said. “But what an expensive way to get your foot in the door.”

Despite working four jobs — tutoring, teaching English, writing college essays and being a nanny — while in school, Sparbanie, 30, still needed loans to help cover the $120,000 cost of her two-year degree. Combined with loans from undergrad, Sparbanie was staring down a total of $67,000 in debt — most used to finance her master’s degree. It’s not the amount that rattled her the most, but the 7 percent interest the federal government wants her to pay on the graduate loans.

“I don’t understand how the government can justify charging that kind of interest,” she said. “I thought the point of these loans is to make it more accessible and affordable for people to be educated.”

Sparbanie is one of the 1.7 million Americans with Grad PLUS loans, one of the fastest-growing and most expensive forms of credit the federal government offers. And experts and lawmakers say the loan program is overdue for fixes.

A <a href="https://tcf.org/content/report/a-framework-for-reforming-federal-graduate-student-aid-policy/" target="_blank">report</a> from a coalition of liberal and conservative outfits — the Century Foundation, EducationCounsel and American Enterprise Institute — proposes a framework to overhaul the system for financing graduate education. The group argues that without meaningful changes, students may be left worse off from pursuing advanced degrees and at a significant cost to taxpayers.

“Without bipartisan reform, the problems in our graduate financing system will just keep snowballing: more debt, fewer affordable programs, and more students unable to repay their loans," said Nathan Arnold, a principal at EducationCounsel and co-author of the report. “We can solve the problem before it spirals out of control, or we can wait and leave taxpayers and borrowers holding the bag.”

Graduate and professional students made up just 21 percent of all enrolled students in 2021-22 but accounted for 47 percent of the student loans the Education Department disbursed that academic year. Enrollment in graduate programs has climbed in the last 20 years amid labor market demands and unfettered lending by the federal government. Researchers say greater demand and access to credit have fueled price hikes, with the cost of master’s degree programs increasing faster than bachelor’s degree programs.

Using Education Department data, the authors of the report released Friday found the average graduate student now borrows triple what they did 30 years ago, with median debt for grads penciling in at more than $70,000 in 2020. Black and Latino graduate students borrow more money and more often than their White counterparts and have a harder time paying down the debt. Nearly half of borrowers with professional degrees in fields such as law and medicine have debt that exceeds one-fifth of their discretionary income — the level at which the <a href="https://sites.ed.gov/ous/files/2023/08/OCE_GraduateDebtReport202308.pdf" target=_blank>Education Department</a> and other researchers deem debt unaffordable.

The report explored five policies that its authors say could work in tandem to improve graduate student aid: setting limits on the amount of loan that can be borrowed; awarding grant aid; ensuring sufficient value and return on investment; enhancing the regulatory structure and consumer protections for private lending; and improving data disclosure and transparency.

They say tackling the policies together — instead of individually — is important because of how the issues interact.

The Grad Plus program lets students borrow up to the full cost of attendance, which researchers say has fueled graduate student debt since the loans were made available in 2006. Before then, students only had access to federal graduate loans that capped borrowing at less than $20,000 a year. Conservative groups and lawmakers, including Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), have called for eliminating Grad Plus or instituting lending limits.

However, the report said such constraints could make it harder for students with few other financial resources to pay for graduate school or drive them to the private markets where there are fewer consumer protections. To mitigate those consequences, Congress could make more grant aid available for graduate students and shore up the regulation of private student loans, the paper said.

While some graduate students can defray the cost of their education with fellowships and teaching or research assistant positions, the aid offered is not always enough and certainly not afforded to everyone. The report’s authors suggest Congress could open up Pell Grants, federal aid provided to undergraduates, to graduate students or create a separate grant program to serve graduate students pursuing low-pay but high-value fields like social work.

“Placing constraints on existing availability of credit is not a comprehensive solution because of the trade-offs and interdependency of these different pieces of the system,” said report co-author Beth Akers, a senior fellow at the conservative-leaning AEI.

She would prefer the government provide more grant aid, rather than use the student loan repayment system, to subsidize graduate education because of the explicit nature of the spending. Borrowers with graduate debt can use income-driven repayment, which ties monthly payments to earnings and family size, to stretch out repayment with the promise of loan forgiveness after 25 years. The expansion of the repayment option and growing enrollment in such plans is part of the reason graduate lending no longer generates revenue but now costs the government money, according to the report.

Meghan Kalendek, 30, struggles to afford her $500-a-month student loan bill for her master’s degree, even after enrolling in President Biden’s new <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/09/01/save-student-loan-repayment-plan-details/" target=_blank>income-driven repayment plan</a>.

The librarian in Belcamp, Md., is working toward public service loan forgiveness, a program that cancels federal student debt after 10 years of on-time payments for people who take public-sector jobs. But she is deferring her payments until April to pay for some much-needed repairs to a fixer-upper she and her husband bought during the three-year pandemic-era pause on student loans. While postponing payments could set her further back from loan forgiveness, it is a trade-off she feels compelled to make.

“We have a ton of work we need to do on the house, but a lot of it we’ll have to eke out year by year because we just can’t afford to do it with student loans,” she said.

Kalendek amassed about $71,000 in federal student loans, with the bulk of the debt from her master’s degree in library science from Pennsylvania Western University. Maryland, like many states, <a href="https://marylandpublicschools.org/about/Pages/DEE/Certification/apply/publiclibrarian.aspx" target=_blank>requires</a> certified public librarians to hold a master’s degree. If Kalendek wanted to remain in the field she loves, she needed an advanced degree.

Arnold at EducationCounsel said states should consider providing additional financial support to offset the cost of credentials that serve the public good. States could also dial back credential requirements altogether, Akers said.

The authors of the report say the increased angst over student debt, which has spawned policy proposals from Democrats and Republicans, offers an opportunity to find bipartisan solutions to improve graduate student aid.

“Accountability doesn’t have a political ideology,” said Tiara Moultrie, a fellow at the left-leaning Century Foundation and co-author of the report. “As time has shifted, both Republicans and Democrats have weighed in on the need for not only high-end accountability and transparency."

Columbia University, New York University

Danielle Douglas-Gabriel covers the economics of higher education, writing about the financial policies that determine a student's access to education and ability to complete a credential. 