The student debt debate continues, and I thought it would be helpful to present some data to give a sense of how serious the problem is. Of course, when something moves from "OK" to "crisis" varies from observer to observer, and the weight of debt might feel like anything from a gnat to an elephant to individual borrowers.

I'll only mention a few points. Media stories frequently mention total student debt — $1.8 trillion! – but this is insufficient to appreciate the situation. You should at the very least know how many borrowers there are, what they borrowed for, and when they should expect to be paid back.

As seen in the table below, a four-year degree and beyond has a high payoff, with a recent bachelor's grad who borrows likely paying only 6.2 percent of their starting salary toward debt repayment. And 45 percent of undergrads did not borrow. Furthermore, grants now account for a significantly bigger portion of undergraduate financial help than loans.

However, shortly before COVID-19, a huge portion of debt was not in "regular" payments – in school, grace, or repayment – and everyone was put into zero-interest forbearance. This shows that many people were having trouble repaying their debts. Furthermore, African Americans have higher debt loads than other races, with a higher percentage of borrowers having repayment issues, raising worries about racial inequities. Still, there does not appear to be a significant enough student debt crisis to justify wholesale cancellation, especially given that taxpayers will be responsible for any outstanding debt.

All data is from the most recent sources that I am aware of, and spans the years 2016 through 2022.

Total Student Loan Debt: $1.8 trillion

Total Federal Student Loan Debt: $1.6 trillion

Total Federal Borrowers: 43.4 million

Share of Families Holding Student Debt: 21%

Federal Debt per Borrower: $37,004 (Total Federal Debt/​Total Federal Borrowers)

Share of Bachelor’s Students Graduating with Debt: 55%

Average Bachelor’s Student Debt at Graduation, Just Borrowers: $28,400

Average Bachelor’s Student Debt at Graduation, All Grads: $15,600

Federal Loans as Share of All Aid, Undergrads: 26%

Federal Loans as Share of All Aid, Grad Students: 65%

Share of Undergrad Aid, Grants, Loans, Other Aid:

 

 

Debt Range:

 

 

Lifetime Earnings above High‐​School‐​Only:

Some College: $0.3 million

Associate’s Degree: $0.4 million

Bachelor’s Degree: $1.2 million

Master’s Degree: $1.6 million

Doctoral Degree: $2.4 million

Professional Degree: $3.1 million

Average Starting Salary, New Bachelor’s Graduate: $55,260

Average Monthly Payment, Undergrad Who Borrowed, Standard (10‐​Year) Plan, 4% Interest: $287.54

Average Annual Payment As a Share of Salary [($287.54*12)/$55,260] * 100: 6.2%

Share of Undergraduate Enrollment, by Race:

White: 56%

African American: 14%

Hispanic: 19%

Asian: 6%

Other: 5%

Share of Graduate Enrollment, by Race:

White: 62%

African American: 14%

Hispanic: 12%

Asian: 8%

Other: 4%

Average Debt by Race:

White: $40,170

African American: $44,880

Hispanic: $30,890

Other: $40,400

Share of Population with Student Debt, by Race:

White: 20%

African American: 30%

Hispanic: 14%

Other: 24%

Repayment Status as of Q1 2020, Most Recent before COVID-19 Repayment Freeze:

 

 

Debt Paid or Not Behind, by Race:

White: 96%

African American: 80%

Hispanic: 77%

By trying to encompass diverse people, public schooling ends up fostering political and social conflicts which, by their adversarial nature, are more likely to have polarizing than unifying effects. Public schooling forces diverse people to fight over whose values, history, or preferred policies the schools will uphold.

If we desire a tolerant, peaceful society, arguably the worst way to do it is to force people into high‐​stakes, zero‐​sum contests. Public education, on the other hand, achieves just that: it divides individuals into camps to select whose ideals will control schools, who will have their history taught, and so on. This is fundamentally polarizing, resulting in perpetual us against them mentalities. It is also avoidable, as many other countries have come to recognize, by allowing funding to follow children to schools their families choose.

While American public schools have been social and cultural battlefields for their entire existence, 2021 was an especially war‐​torn year, as I summarized a couple of weeks ago. 2021 saw a record number of conflicts logged on Cato’s Public Schooling Battle Map, and the entire country has seen searing images of screaming crowds at school board meetings, fistfights, arrests, and federal law enforcement called upon to investigate “domestic terrorism” by public schooling combatants. This as neighbors have had to fight one another to determine whose views on intensely emotional subjects such as racial justice, sexuality and gender, and health and child development, would prevail.

People would no longer be driven into warring educational camps if money followed children to the educational arrangements that their families choose. At the very least, when it came to education, they may once again be considered neighbors or fellow citizens. It would also reduce reasonable resentments when parents believe, very rightly, that their children are being forced to learn undesirable values or teachings, or that critical knowledge is being withheld from them in public schools.

However, wouldn't having a choice allow individuals to engage in fringe doctrines that radicalize children?

Significant radicalization is not what we observe in other places with more choice, and U.S. research overwhelmingly finds that private schools produce more tolerant, civically engaged, and knowledgeable citizens than public schools. And as the Capitol attack itself testifies, public schooling has not erased radicalization and may well have fueled it, with education matters such as interpreting American history – the New York Times’ “1619 Project” versus the Trump 1776 Commission – figuring prominently in angry national debates.

Indeed, of the now‐​68 rioters for whom we have found education information, only 5 attended private high schools, and 1 attended a private elementary school. 6 of 68 is 8.8 percent; less than the share of all students who have annually attended private versus public schools since 1995, which has fluctuated between 9.7 and 11.7 percent. Include homeschoolers to calculate the national private share – we did not find any homeschoolers among the rioters – and in the most recent federal data private education accounted for 12.5 percent of all students.

Obviously, this isn't conclusive. We don't have data on a lot of Capitol stormers, and we only have high school statistics on a lot of them. However, when this is combined with the corpus of empirical data showing that private schools generate more tolerant and civically aware kids, worries that choice would result in a more politicized or undemocratic society are unfounded.

All of this is to say that we cannot place all or even most of the responsibility for the toxic stew that resulted in the January 6 embarrassment on public education. There were a lot of potent factors in it, from globalization to plain old demagoguery, and private schoolers aren't immune to conflict or bloodshed. But, at the at least, we may infer that public education is not the panacea for social differences or political instability that its proponents depict it to be, and that it may well have contributed to the outburst of rage and lawlessness on January 6, 2021.

The narrative continues: Angry outbursts and demonstrations at school board meetings around the country are not a product of widespread displeasure, but a right‐​wing fringe. It is a narrative that left‐​leaning elites in the media and academia seem to embrace, perhaps because they can blame their politically least favorite people for trouble. But it's also a story that's very certain to exacerbate rifts, confirming what makes many on the right so angry: elites, sometimes sponsored by taxpayers, abandoning fairness while portraying themselves as paragons of objective truth seeking.

Writing a few days ago in progressive Slate about a survey he conducted with the ostensibly politically neutral American Historical Association and taxpayer‐​funded ($167.5 million) National Endowment for the Humanities, Fairleigh Dickinson University history professor Pete Burkholder asserted that Americans are not as divided on the teaching of history as recent school board fireworks might suggest. He based this primarily on roughly three‐​quarters of respondents agreeing that it is “acceptable to teach history about harm done to others even if it causes discomfort.”

 

What was Burkholder's method of reporting this discovery? When combined with the findings of other polls, it appears that the majority of people strongly support left-wing issues ranging from gun background checks to more taxes on the wealthy, he wrote, “The loudmouths interrupting school board meetings and staging vaccine ‘freedom’ protests don’t represent popular, to say nothing of valid, viewpoints on science and history.”

Take that, angry people! You are fringe jerks who not only should not get your way, your views are simply invalid.

But are people unhappy with history curricula and other hot‐​button schooling issues really fringe?

For starters, a quarter of people holding a particular view is not a tiny group. It is one out of every four people, or significantly more than say they watch baseball “a great deal” or a “good amount.” In other words, baseball fans. Would we consider baseball fans fringe?

Worse than the interpretation of the numbers on this particular question, however, is that Burkholder’s own poll indicates much deeper division than what he elevates in his essay marginalizing upset citizens. On the foundational question of how history should present the basic nature of the United States – bad because of its sins, or good because of its core principles and perceived progress toward justice – the public is split almost 50/50.

 

When asked whether history should “celebrate” or “question the nation’s past,” the overall split was 47 percent for questioning, 53 percent for celebrating. When it came to partisanship, 70 percent of Democrats favored questioning, while 84 percent of Republicans favored celebrating. Independents were virtually evenly split, with 51 percent rejoicing and 49 percent doubting.

 

The nation is almost evenly divided between the 1619 Project and 1776 Commission, though with a little lean toward the right‐​wing side.

Ironically, Burkholder’s survey may not just reveal deep splits, but also illustrate the wages of left‐​wing elites playing loose with evidence to own the cons: people on the right not trusting “experts.”

The survey has several questions concerning trust in experts, but a particularly apropos one – “trust placed in college and university professors to provide an accurate account of history” – shows that while 44 percent of Democrats put a “great deal” of trust in profs, only 18 percent of Republicans do. Adding “some” trust in professors, Dems were 88 percent trusting, versus only 63 percent of Republicans.

The fringe‐​right‐​wingers narrative is too simple, and politically convenient, an explanation for what is driving anger about education. And the more elites on the left ignore confounding evidence in order to push that narrative, the more understandable anger on the right becomes.