The Best and Worst States for Student Debt
Where you go to college and what major you pick can have huge financial consequences, but where you live after graduating can also have a big impact on how much your diploma is worth — and how well you can handle your student debt.
How likely are you to land a good paying job? How high will your living expenses be? The answers to those questions and others like them go a long way to determining how burdensome those monthly student loans payments are.
Related: The Best Investment the U.S. Could Make—Affordable Higher Education
To ensure your loan doesn’t break you, experts suggest that your payment should not exceed 8 to 10 percent of your monthly income.
Unsurprisingly, the personal finance website WalletHub says, “Student-loan borrowers will fare better in states that produce a combination of lower college-related debt levels, stronger economies and higher incomes.”
To find those states, WalletHub looked at seven metrics, with special emphasis given to student debt as a percentage of average income, the local unemployment rate for people aged 25 to 34 and the percentage of borrowers aged 50 or older. Here are the 10 best and worst states for student debt. You can click on your state on the map below to see where it ranks.
Related: Private Student Loans: Everything You Need to Know
10 Best States for Student Debt
- Utah
- Wyoming
- North Dakota
- Washington
- Nebraska
- Virginia
- Wisconsin
- Minnesota
- Colorado
- South Dakota
10 Worst States for Student Debt
- Mississippi
- Rhode Island
- Connecticut
- Maine
- Georgia
- South Carolina
- New York
- Alabama
- West Virginia
- Oregon
Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
Stat of the Day: 0.2%
The New York Times’ Jim Tankersley tweets: “In order to raise enough revenue to start paying down the debt, Trump would need tariffs to be ~4% of GDP. They're currently 0.2%.”
Read Tankersley’s full breakdown of why tariffs won’t come close to eliminating the deficit or paying down the national debt here.
Number of the Day: 44%
The “short-term” health plans the Trump administration is promoting as low-cost alternatives to Obamacare aren’t bound by the Affordable Care Act’s requirement to spend a substantial majority of their premium revenues on medical care. UnitedHealth is the largest seller of short-term plans, according to Axios, which provided this interesting detail on just how profitable this type of insurance can be: “United’s short-term plans paid out 44% of their premium revenues last year for medical care. ACA plans have to pay out at least 80%.”
Number of the Day: 4,229
The Washington Post’s Fact Checkers on Wednesday updated their database of false and misleading claims made by President Trump: “As of day 558, he’s made 4,229 Trumpian claims — an increase of 978 in just two months.”
The tally, which works out to an average of almost 7.6 false or misleading claims a day, includes 432 problematics statements on trade and 336 claims on taxes. “Eighty-eight times, he has made the false assertion that he passed the biggest tax cut in U.S. history,” the Post says.
Number of the Day: $3 Billion
A new analysis by the Department of Health and Human Services finds that Medicare’s prescription drug program could have saved almost $3 billion in 2016 if pharmacies dispensed generic drugs instead of their brand-name counterparts, Axios reports. “But the savings total is inflated a bit, which HHS admits, because it doesn’t include rebates that brand-name drug makers give to [pharmacy benefit managers] and health plans — and PBMs are known to play games with generic drugs to juice their profits.”
Chart of the Day: Public Spending on Job Programs
President Trump announced on Thursday the creation of a National Council for the American Worker, charged with developing “a national strategy for training and retraining workers for high-demand industries,” his daughter Ivanka wrote in The Wall Street Journal. A report from the president’s National Council on Economic Advisers earlier this week made it clear that the U.S. currently spends less public money on job programs than many other developed countries.
