Old habits die hard. So it is with being a recovering student debtor, it seems.
Gallup and Purdue University released a joint survey this May that studied the relationship between college education and quality of life. The polling organization flagged a portion of the study late last week in which respondents — an impressive number of 30,000 — associated higher levels of student debt they absorbed to pay for school with lower measurements of their “well-being.” Read the table’s description below (at top) for details:
Let’s not scream “shocker!” all at once. It’s evident that heavy personal debt can weigh life down, and the three categories affected most by increasing debt according to the figures above — purpose, finances, and physical health — are logical.
Purpose: A person who graduates with high student debt is less capable of being choosy about work and life decisions, so it’s natural that he or she would have a relatively more difficult time immediately settling into a desired career path. You have to pay the bills somehow, in other words, and may feel “purposeless” because of it. A lack of debt is liberating.
Finances: Self-explanatory.
Physical health: It’s been demonstrated that higher incomes are associated with better health. (See the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the World Health Organization.) However, it’s necessary to contextualize income levels by considering a person’s ability to allocate the money — what’s a high income, after all, if you can’t keep any of it because of bills? For instance, all else being equal, who seems better off: a person making $50,000 a year and $2,000 in debt, or a person making $100,000 a year and $75,000 in debt?
Considering that the Gallup study only accounted for undergraduate debt — not considering doctors, for instance, who have particularly high student debt from medical school, but also particularly high earnings — it’s reasonable to assume that those with higher student debt levels generally have far less money to spend during a given month than those with low debt or who are debt-free. And among health care, diet, exercise and pleasure, good health costs money.
The stressed-out debtor busting tail just to meet monthly payments is not the ideal body of healthfulness.
What is revealing about Gallup and Purdue’s work, however, is the finding that “even 25 years after you’ve graduated, the more debt you carry when you graduated, the more poorly you scored on [the] questions later on,” Wall Street Journal reporter Doug Belkin said in an interview. (Belkin wrote an article about the study.) In other words, student debt is scarring.
See below for a comparison of graduates across decades:
Although grads in the 2000s report that they’re worse off than their 90s predecessors, the 90s graduates aren’t all that chipper. Most notable are the answers to the “purpose” and “physical” questions, which track closely with the graduate respondents of the current century. (Note: Gallup said it “did not ask respondents about the status of their student debt or inquire into how much of their loan they have repaid,” so while earlier graduates are more likely to have paid off their loans, it wasn’t taken into account in the study.)
Belkin noted a reason, perhaps, as to why — high student debt can “influence decisions … for years,” creating a ripple effect on a person’s life. Graduating with, say, $50,000 in student debt can derail career and life plans if workforce opportunities don’t present themselves to a graduate’s liking. And they often don’t. Individuals then opt for the best-paying work and lowest-cost living arrangements available, often for years, to cope with the price of repayment. It’s at this point that the idea of “career” becomes a means to an end — work with the central purpose of eliminating personal debt.
Once people have toiled to fulfill their obligations fully, a process that takes years, it becomes difficult to reset life and discover the “purpose” and related well-being factors that high debtors seem to lack relative to their better-off peers.
As this Gallup study shows, student debt is no average monthly bill. It is a time-release pill that affects debtors years after they take it. And it is life-altering.
