By Tamar Lewin. When Michele Fitzgerald and her daughter, Jenni, go out for dinner, Jenni pays. When they get haircuts, Jenni pays. When they buy groceries, Jenni pays.
It has been six years since Ms. Fitzgerald — broke, unemployed and in default on the $18,000 in loans she took out for Jenni’s college education — became a boomerang mom, moving into her daughter’s townhouse apartment in Hingham, Mass.
Jenni pays the rent.
For Jenni, 35, the student loans and the education they bought have worked out: she has a good job in public relations and is paying down the loans in her name. But for her mother, 60, the parental debt has been disastrous. More...

Par Laurence Defranoux. En 2008, le vote des jeunes avait été déterminant, 66% des 18-29 ans ayant voté pour Barack Obama. Aujourd'hui, les étudiants sont touchés de plein fouet par l'accroissement du montant de leurs emprunts, qu'ils peinent à rembourser et qui pèsent sur leur avenir (lire notre reportage à la fac de Portland). Ce fardeau pourrait jouer sur le taux d'abstention des jeunes. A quelques jours du scrutin, Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin, chercheur à l’OCDE, analyse les causes du deuxième poste d'endettement des Américains. 
Quelle est l'ampleur de l'endettement des étudiants aux Etats-Unis?
Les deux tiers des étudiants américains diplômés sont endettés, pour un montant moyen de 26 600 dollars, qui peut atteindre le double dans certains Etats. Les montants les plus élevés se retrouvent en général chez les étudiants issus des établissements privés à but lucratif, aux frais d'inscription élevés, aux programmes plus variés, et qui acceptent plus d'étudiants en difficulté. En 2009, le défaut de remboursement s'y montait d'ailleurs à 15% en moyenne, contre 4% dans les établissements privés à but non lucratif et 6% dans le public. Mais il faut relativiser: le nombre d'inscrits dans ces établissements n'est pas considérable. Il y a aussi une grande différence entre le prix affiché des études et le prix réellement payé, qui peut être très raisonnable au bout du compte dans une université publique. Le coût du logement, lui, reste incompressible.

By Nicola Jenvey. South Africa’s Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande recently revealed that graduates acquiring tertiary education with assistance from the government-funded National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) owe R13.4 billion (US$1.5 billion) in unpaid loans – and about 20% of them have not repaid a single cent.
He proposes getting the South African Revenue Service involved by deducting money from defaulters' salaries, claiming that recouping the capital had become “a priority”.
By its own admission the NSFAS, in its 2011 annual report delivered to the Parliamentary Monitoring Group in February this year, the scheme is "not good at recovering loans". Only R638 million or 5% of the long-term loan amounting to R12.2 billion has been recovered.
Despite the debt repayment issue, Nzimande hails the NSFAS as "a feather in the government's cap", with R5 billion disbursed in the current financial year. The annual report reflected that the scheme had disbursed R19 billion to students since its inception in 1999 and this year's figure followed the R5.5 billion disbursed in 2011. More...

By Tamar Lewin. The average student-loan debt of borrowers in the college class of 2011 rose to about $26,500, a 5 percent increase from about $25,350 the previous year, according to a report by the Institute for College Access and Success’s Project on Student Debt.
The project said that about two-thirds of those who earned bachelor’s degrees last year had loans. About one-fifth of the debt was from private student loans, which have fewer consumer protections and repayment options than federal loans. Although federal data show that graduates of for-profit colleges are far more likely to borrow, and borrow more, than those who attend other types of colleges, the report’s findings focus only on public and nonprofit colleges, because only nine for-profit colleges (less than 2 percent) reported the necessary figures.
Over all, this year’s report, the institute’s seventh, was based on responses from 55 percent of the institutions surveyed. But many colleges, including a quarter of those singled out for high debt levels in the previous report, did not report their debt figures for the class of 2011. The College Board’s debt estimates, based on a different survey, will not be released until next week, but Sandra Baum, the economist who writes that report, said they would be slightly lower than the figures in the Project on Student Debt report. The project’s report stresses the need for the federal government to gather and disseminate information on every college’s average debt at graduation.
“Voluntarily reported data is all that we’ve got to shed light on how debt at graduation varies from school to school and year to year,” said Matthew Reed, the primary author of the report. “Twelve percent of the colleges that reported debt data for 2010 didn’t report for 2011, and virtually no for-profit colleges reported at all.”
“The need for federal collection of key debt information at all colleges could not be more clear,” Mr. Reed added.
While a college degree remains the likeliest route to employment and good wages, Lauren Asher, who heads the student-debt project, said that at a time of rising tuition and low employment rates for young people, fear of debt might stop some students from getting the education they needed. Better consumer information could help address that problem, she said. Average debt varied widely from college to college, as did the share of students graduating with loans. Of those that reported their data and had more than 100 graduates, Lawrence Technological University, in Michigan, had the highest average debt: $46,677, with 74 percent of graduates having borrowed. York College, part of the public City University of New York, had the lowest: $2,996, with 24 percent of graduates having borrowed. There were 64 colleges where more than 90 percent of graduates had debt.
Average debt at graduation also varied from state to state, from a high of $32,450 in New Hampshire to a low of $17,227 in Utah. As in previous years, the high-debt states were concentrated in the Northeast and the Midwest, and low-debt states in the West and the South.

A report from the Institute for Higher Education Policy concludes that no-loan policies have positive effects, but more can still be done for greater diversity.
A new report from the Institute for Higher Education Policy — Economic Diversity Among Selective Colleges: Measuring the Enrollment Impact of No-Loan Programs — deals with research questions about what US colleges can do to increase attendance of low-income students while remaining highly selective, and why it is important that they pursue the goal.
It has been 15 years since several private and public institutions introduced ‘no-loan’ financial aid programs for their four-year college degrees. Instead of student loans, incoming undergraduates whose family income was less than the national median would receive non-repayable grants and scholarships. There has been a significant spread of no-loan policies in the years since, but no comprehensive report on the impact they have had, or if they achieve their goals of increasing economic diversity among the undergraduate base for highly selective colleges. The IHEP report seeks to address this research gap.
The overall conclusion of the report is that the introduction of no-loan programs at US colleges has been beneficial and produced positive results; however, there is still more work to be done to move towards greater economic diversity.
“No-loan programs that are well thought out are a step in the right direction. And although some institutions may be backing away from offering these aid packages, these policies give hope to the idea that colleges and universities can become more inclusive of accepting our nation’s brightest students who by chance come from low-income households,” says IHEP President Michelle Asha Cooper, Ph.D. “By removing cost barriers, as outlined in this brief, colleges and universities may someday become more representative of our nation’s economic diversity.”
The report’s recommendations include: Targeting eligibility requirements to Pell-eligible students; Increasing the visibility of the programs by actively publicizing them as part of a wider outreach effort to low-income students; Resisting the temptation to skim from the financial aid program; and pushing for the implementation of Federal or state incentives to encourage more colleges to adopt the no-loan policies.
The report notes that while many colleges aspire to emulate the no-loan models delivered by top-class institutions, they run into funding problems when designing their own no-loan pledges:
Most colleges and universities (private or public) do not have the financial resources to be as generous as highly selective institutions and therefore modify their policies. Two in every three no-loan institutions (69 percent) restrict their no-loan aid to students from low (43 percent) or moderate (26 percent) income levels.
The Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP) is a non-profit organization which promotes access to and success in higher education for all students. IHEP develops policy and practice research to aid education leaders and policymakers in dealing with the many education challenges facing the nation.