Live in Boston? If you are the average student debt carrying Bostonian you have a balance $11,382.67 larger than the average student debt carrying New Yorker. That’s because at $43,398.48 Boston is the U.S. metro-area with the highest average student loan debt. The average in New York, which ranks 21st, is $32,015.81.
Joining Boston in the top five slots are: Washington D.C. with $41,394.45 in average student debt, San Francisco with $39,914.56, Durham, NC with $38,461.68 and Atlanta with $37,945.66.
To find the cities with the highest average debt loads credit monitoring site Credit Karma first identified which of its 35 million users are carrying student loan balances. They found that 36% of users have at least one open student loan, that figure jumps to 49% for people age 25 to 34. Then they zoomed in on those currently living in the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the United States. The figure for each city is the average educational debt load for people with open student loans – so it does not include people who never had loans or people who already paid them off.
While at first this list may not seem like an enviable one to top, Bethy Hardeman, chief consumer advocate at Credit Karma, points to some surprisingly positive reasons cities may rank.
For one, a notable characteristic of some of the highest ranking metros is that they are also known for having a large number of universities and therefore sizable student populations. Boston alone has around 35 universities and more than 250,000 students if you include Cambridge, home to Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Durham is famously home to Duke University. Since student loans can appear on your credit report while you’re still in school Credit Karma’s data includes people currently in school who generally have not started paying down their debt.
Many of the cities with the highest averages also have large populations of young professionals who have not yet had time to pay down a large chunk of their balances. “Another thing we see in this list is a lot of places that are really desirable to live right now because of booming economies or up-and-coming economies,” says Hardeman. Think of the tech-boom in San Francisco. Hardeman also points to Atlanta’s high rank as perhaps surprising to some, but she notes that the city has the eighth largest economy in the United States with a large number of big companies and growing number of new companies. Similarly, thanks in part to the allure of jobs in the federal government and surrounding industry Washington D.C. has a median age of just 34, lower than any state.
Why then doesn’t New York — the city where the characters on Friends, Girls and countless other 20-something fictions landed post-grad — rank higher? She posits that including boroughs beyond Manhattan may have brought down the average.
It may also be the case that jobs in D.C. are more likely than some other cities to require graduate education, such as law school. Washingtonians may therefore have “more debt because they went to school for longer or went to more expensive schools as well. Higher educated individuals tend to gravitate toward places like D.C. where the job opportunities require more schooling,” notes Hardeman.
On a less positive note some of the highest ranking cities are also among the most expensive to live in. “What is interesting there is you have these students that are burdened with heavy student loan debt. Yes, they are moving to these cities for presumably great jobs with great pay but they are still carrying a lot of debt. So somewhere down the line thinking about refinancing or just consolidating to have one monthly payment is going to be wise for these graduates,” says Hardeman. “Ultimately you can move to a city for an opportunity but you need to look at what your starting salary is going to be and, once you have to start paying that student loan burden, how much of your monthly income that is going to take up.”
Which city has the lowest average? Laredo, TX with just $18,047.93 in average student debt.
The 25 Metro Areas With The Highest Average Student Loan Debt
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