Kin-Inequality: Education Debt in Middle to Later Adulthood

• In Event: 30620 - Section on Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2: Educational Trajectories and Inequality

Abstract

While many people associate student loan borrowers primarily with young adults, this perception is misleading; education debt affects multiple generations, including parents and grandparents who take loans for their kin. I first use non-parametric methods to describe within-cohort stratification in debt accumulation during the middle to later stages of adulthood (ages 35 to 55) and look at variation by family structure. Next, I focus on education debt for children and use a Cragg's Tobit model and logistic regression to understand the debt portfolio characteristics of who enters into education debt for their children and the amount of education debt for their children they take on. Multiple surveys that collect wealth information simply report education debt at the household level, obscuring debt taken on for kin. I leverage data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 to describe the 22% of the cohort with educational debt for themselves or their children during this stage of the life course.

Author

• Catalina Mariafernanda Anampa Castro, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor