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It goes without saying that college is expensive. While it provides students with a lot of benefits – a higher level of education and a degree, valuable connections with professors and advisors, and strong friendships – it comes at a huge cost.
While the price tag can be reduced in a variety of ways – including scholarships, being a commuter student and/or getting your associate’s degree at a community college – oftentimes, that isn’t enough. According to a 2017 CNBC article, 70% of college grads graduate with student loan debt. Additionally, according to U.S. News and World Report (2019), it’s a “$1.46 trillion student loan debt crisis affecting an estimated 44 million borrowers.”
Women affected worse overall
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However, these loans don’t affect everyone in the same way; in fact, data has shown that women are impacted worse by student loan debt than men are – not only in the amount they owe, but in the time that it takes women to pay the loans back (the latter will be addressed later).
For starters though, women are more likely to have debt after college than men are. According to the American Association of University Women (AAUW), “AAUW’s analysis of federal government data has found that women are more likely to take on debt: 41 percent of female undergraduates took on debt in 2015–16 (the latest figures available) compared to 35 percent of male undergraduates.”
It naturally follows then that women would be responsible for more of the debt than men – and there’s data to show that. According to the AAUW website, “Women hold nearly two-thirds of the outstanding student debt in the United States — almost $929 billion as of early-2019.” The AAUW also released a report back in 2017, that said that “[w]hen gauged against the total $1.31 trillion in outstanding student debt estimated by the New York Federal Reserve as of the end of 2016, we estimate that women hold $833 billion in student debt while men hold $477 billion.”
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Within the broader category of women though, African American students and Hispanic women, in particular, have the most loan debt. “Overall, black college graduates must grapple with the highest average student loan debt of any racial or ethnic group,” the AAUW report said. “The typical black woman who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 2011-12 did so with about $29,000 in student loans while black men averaged $25,000 in student loans. Asian graduates had the lowest debt, averaging about $11,000 in debt at graduation.”
As to those who graduated with a certain threshold of debt, the report continued on to say, “Just over a third—34 percent—of black women who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 2011-12 did so with more than $40,000 in student debt compared to 16 percent of Hispanic women, 10 percent of white women, and 8 percent of Asian women.”
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With regard to women in general though, while part of why they owe so much more might have a little to do with the fact that there are more women enrolled in college (according to the AAUW report, it was 56% women in Fall 2016), that’s such a small percentage difference – it can’t possibly account for the drastically disparate amounts that are owed.
Most of the actual reasons fall on factors that occur before, but really primarily after, college. Let’s start with the ones that come into play before college (organized alphabetically).
For-profit colleges
The main difference between non-profit and for-profit colleges is what your tuition money goes towards. While non-profits (what most colleges are) use your tuition money to educate you, for-profit schools are different.
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According to Money Crashers, for-profit colleges “operate as a business, and the product they sell is education. Their goal is to provide quality education, and in doing so generate a positive return, or profit, for their shareholders.” That’s not to say they’re all bad – the Money Crashers article includes a list of detailed advantages and disadvantages to for-profit schools.
However, the problem is that there are a lot of valid criticisms regarding for-profit schools – one being the higher cost of education. In general, it could be anywhere from two to four-and-a-half times as expensive as a public college.
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Plus, since the bill is more expensive – and a lot of for-profit schools don’t offer institutional aid – it’s no surprise that those college students need to take out more loans. According to Forbes, “Graduates of for-profit colleges are the most likely to have student loans, with 88 percent holding educational debt. Compare that to just 66 percent of public college graduates with student loan debt. For-profit college graduates also leave school with higher student loan balances, averaging $39,950 for four-year degrees.”
But that’s not all – for-profit schools also have pretty high post-grad unemployment rates. According to the Center for Online Education, “Studies have found that certificate-earners at for-profit colleges are less likely to find employment after graduation and end up making significantly less than their nonprofit counterparts.”
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Add those all together – an expensive education with little institutional aid, which likely means more student loans, and a low chance of well-paying employment (if employment at all) after graduation – and that’s a recipe for not being able to pay off your loans (and possibly defaulting on them, which is explained later).
Now, all of this is important because “[w]omen are also more likely to be targeted by for-profit institutions,” savingforcollege.com said. The Center for Online Education states that the typical for-profit college student is from a “vulnerable population,” including women (especially low-income women) and people of color (especially African American men and women, and Hispanic women). According to the AAUW report, “Among for-profit college students 64 percent are women, 52 percent are nonwhite.”
Larger loans
According to the AAUW website, in 2015-2016 and for bachelor’s degrees, women took out an average of $21,619 in student loans, compared to men with only $18,880 in student loans. That’s a difference of $2,739, or an about 12.67% difference.
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The website also said that “[o]n average across degree levels, women in college took on initial student loan balances that were about 14 percent greater than men’s in 2015–16. Upon completion of a bachelor’s degree, women’s average student debt is about $2,700 greater than men’s, and black women take on more student debt on average than do members of any other group.”
It’s hard to say what the reasons are for this, but part of it might have to do with the expected family contribution (EFC). According to the savingforcollege.com article, “When women fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), their Expected Family Contribution (EFC) is lower than that of men. That means that women start with fewer resources to pay for college, and have to rely on more financial aid to cover the gap.”
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However, that all being said, most of the reasons why women have more of the student loan debt are still because of what happens after college – when it comes to paying those accrued student loans back.
Women take longer and have more trouble paying back loans than men do
For a lot of reasons (that are detailed below), men are often able to pay their loans back in a shorter period of time, thus contributing to the fact that women’s debts make up the majority of the national student loan debt.
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According to the AAUW one-page version of the report, “Women take about two years longer than men to repay student loans and are more likely to struggle economically as they do so.” Nitro backed that up, saying “The typical female college graduate takes about 21% longer (or 1.9 years longer) to pay back her student loans than it takes the typical male college graduate.”
The AAUW report provided some specific numbers. It noted that “[b]etween 2009 and 2012 men paid about 38 percent of their student debt balance while women paid about 31 percent of theirs.” Breaking it down by race, the report continued on to explain that “[b]lack women and Hispanic women paid off only about 12 percent and 18 percent of their debt in that three-year period, respectively, compared to 33 percent and 60 percent of white and Asian women.”
Now, here are the primary reasons (also in alphabetical order) as to why women have trouble paying their debts back after college.
Caring for their child/children
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Societal norms and stereotypical gender roles indicate that the childcare responsibilities more often fall on the mother, and this usually results in one of two quite different options. However, being a stay-at-home mom or being a working mother both have a significant impact on the woman’s career and thus, her ability to pay back her student loans.
Thus, “[c]hild care is necessary for parents—particularly mothers—to work and earn an income, yet it has become an increasingly crushing expense for families with young children,” the Center for American Progress (CAP) reported. “Over the past two decades, the cost of childcare has more than doubled, while wages have remained mostly stagnant.” As a result, many families find it’s not worth it, and if they can’t/don’t turn to their family and/or friends for childcare help, then it’s likely that one of the parents will quit their job to take care of the kids – and, as mentioned before, it’s often the moms that do that.
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“In a 2018 survey conducted by the Center for American Progress, mothers were 40 percent more likely than fathers to report that they had personally felt the negative impact of child care issues on their careers,” CAP said. “[M]others said that if they had access to more affordable and reliable child care, they would increase their earnings and progress in their careers by finding a higher-paying job, applying for a promotion, seeking more hours at work, or finding a job in the first place.”
This trouble is compounded for single mothers, who have to find some sort of childcare option so that they can work. For them especially (although for mothers in general as well), “[w]ith the cost of having to send a child to daycare or to find alternative options, women have less discretionary income to pay down their debt,” the savingforcollege.com article said.
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A lack of affordable and quality childcare is especially hard on women of color. “Overall, mothers of color reported higher levels of difficulty finding child care than white mothers,” CAP said. “Hispanic mothers cited ‘location’ as the top reason for difficulty at about two times the rate of white and black mothers, which is consistent with the fact that Hispanic families are also more likely than white or black families to live in a child care desert. Black mothers were significantly more likely than white mothers to cite cost as the top reason for difficulty. For a typical black family, the average annual cost of center-based child care for two children amounts to 42 percent of median income, so it is not surprising that black mothers report cost as a major barrier.”
Additionally, family responsibilities discrimination (FRD) plays a role too. According to Workplace Fairness, it’s “employment discrimination that is based on workers’ responsibilities to care for their family members.”
The same article said that “[w]omen with children are most likely to encounter FRD: they are 79% less likely to be recommended for hire, 100% less likely to be promoted, and are generally offered at least $10,000 less in salary for the same position as a similarly situated male.” All of that makes it harder for women to pay back their loans with the same speed that men can and do.
Default rates
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According to the AAUW website, “Difficulty repaying student loans is also reflected in default rates, which are higher for women than for men, and much higher for black and Hispanic borrowers than for white and Asian borrowers.”
Delinquency means you missed your first student loan payment, but defaulting on your loans is the next step. Defaulting means you’ve been delinquent/haven’t made your loan payments for 270 days (about nine months) or more.
According to the AAUW report, men have a default rate of 2.4%, while women’s are 3.5%. The breakdown by race is:
- Asians (male and female): 1%
- White men: 1.5%
- White women: 3%
- Hispanic women: 4.2%
- Hispanic men: 4.9%
- Black women: 7.8%
- Black men: 9.8%
Gender wage gap
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This is, by far, the biggest reason that women have trouble paying their loans back after college. Equal pay is something that’s discussed all the time nowadays, but, as The Nation explains quite well, it’s when “women are paid less than men for the same amount and type of work simply for being a woman instead of a man.”
This is a problem that exists across all different industries and career paths. According to the AAUW website, “The pay gap starts as soon as women enter the workforce and widens as time goes on: Women college graduates working full-time are paid 18 percent less than their male peers one year after graduation. By four years after graduation, that gap widens to 20 percent. Overall, women with bachelor’s degrees working full-time make 26 percent less than their male peers.”
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In fact, Equal Pay Today (founded by the National Committee on Pay Equity) is a project that “symbolize[s] the number of days a woman must work into the next year in order to earn what a man earned in the previous year,” the U.S. News and World Report article said. According to Equal Pay Today, this is how far women of different races have to work into 2019, to earn what white men earned from January 1, 2018 to December 31, 2018.
- Women overall: April 2 (92 days); $0.80 to the dollar
- Asian-American women: March 5 (64 days); $0.85 to the dollar
- White women: April 19 (109 days); $0.77 to the dollar
- African-American/Black women: August 22 (234 days); $0.61 to the dollar
- Native American women: September 23 (266 days); $0.58 to the dollar
- Hispanic women: November 20 (324 days); $0.53 to the dollar
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It wasn’t much different in 2016 – according to the U.S. Census report from that year, women earned $0.805 to the dollar and made over $10,000 less a year than men did. Additionally, the AAUW one-page report listed the 2016 average weekly earnings for full-time workers who had a bachelor’s degree, separated by gender and then race.
- White men: $1,385
- White women: $1,005 (73%)
- Asian women: $1,129 (82%)
- Hispanic women: $910 (66%)
- African American/Black women: $877 (63%)
Perceptions of how women should behave might also have some play into the gender wage gap. “In many instances, women may be considered ‘too bossy’ in situations that require her to lead, or ‘too emotional’ in situations that require her to be passionate,” The Nation article said. “For a man, this means he is ‘assertive’ as a leader and ‘dedicated’ to his work. Translate this into pay raises, and you find that men are 5 percent more likely to get a pay raise—a small number that adds up to a big bonus over a lifetime.”
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Therefore, factors that impact women before and after college can explain the drastically different student loan debt that women have collectively, compared to men. A majority of those same components also include additional problems that face African American and Hispanic women.
If you’re one of the many people who have gone through college and have student loans to pay back, but are not sure how to start, a different U.S. News and World Report article has a list of steps to take to create a “Student Loan Repayment Plan.” Additionally, that above savingforcollege.com article has a few suggestions on how to “handle your student loans.”
