Want to avoid high student debt? Then you might want to stay away from colleges in Washington, D.C., and Iowa and head to Utah and Hawaii. Seniors who graduated from colleges in those two states were stuck with an average debt of $29,973 and $28,174 in 2008. Consider instead schools in Utah or Hawaii, where average debts for 2008 seniors were $13,041 and $15,156, respectively, far below the national average of $23,200.
Those debt levels are the calculations of a report released Tuesday by The Project on Student Debt (.pdf), an initiative of the nonprofit Institute for College Access & Success based in Berkeley, Calif. Rounding out its Top 10 low-debt states are Kentucky, Wyoming, Arizona, Georgia, California, Louisiana, Nevada, and Colorado. (Click on the chart above for average debt figures as well as the Top 10 high-debt states.)
If anything, these totals understate the real debt burden by up to $5,000, according to the report, in part because colleges may not know all the private loans that students bear.
In general, states in the Northeast tend to fall in the high-debt category, perhaps because they have a higher-than-average share of students attending private colleges and schools with higher-than-average tuition. Western states tend to fall in the low-debt category because of the reverse.
But those generalizations don’t always hold true. Just ask graduates of Iowa colleges, who have the dubious distinction of holding more debt than any other state. That’s because most of its schools lie above the national average, including Iowa State University, which with a $31,616 average student debt tops even well-known private schools such as Harvard ($10,813), MIT ($14,148), and Stanford ($15,724).
Of course, the best college deal for any particular student doesn’t depend on averages and may come from a school with a high-debt average. And because the debt survey did not include nearly a third of college graduates and because schools differ in how they calculate student debt, The Project for Student Debt concluded the data were not reliable enough to rank low- and high-debt schools.
Nevertheless, you can find the voluntarily reported data for particular schools by clicking here and then clicking on the state where they’re located.
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