Student loan debt can be crushing—and not just as grads struggle to pay it off. It can take a toll decades into the future, affecting people’s ability to prepare for retirement, and new research is taking a closer look.
Prudential Financial, Inc. and the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College jointly released the latest National Retirement Risk Index research, which highlights and examines the implications of student debt on Americans’ retirement readiness, at an event in the nation’s capital.
Titled “The Impact of Student Debt on Financial Preparedness,” the event included a panel discussion that addressed not just the differential in salaries between college grads and nongraduates, but the cost of those diplomas to graduates’ eventual retirement savings.
The CRR also released a new Issue in Brief titled “Will the Explosion of Student Debt Widen the Retirement Security Gap?” In addition, Prudential released a companion white paper.
The brief’s analysis uses the National Retirement Risk Index (NRRI), which measures the percentage of working-age households “at risk” of being unable to maintain their preretirement standard of living during retirement. According to the brief, if NRRI households had started out with today’s student debt levels, the index would be 56.2 percent instead of the “already alarming” 51.6 percent.
While the median worker with a bachelor’s degree earned $57,252 in 2014, compared with the median worker with a high school diploma who earned just $34,736, the need to repay the debt resulting from pursuing a higher degree can mean that graduates can’t also afford to save for retirement.
And the problem isn’t confined to graduates, as the brief pointed out, since parents are taking out loans for their children’s education.
In addition, student loan debt affects not just saving for retirement, but causes people to delay home purchases, which can also cut the amount of funds they may have available in retirement. The brief said, “[H]ouseholds with student debt are 6.7 percent less likely to own a home and … the homes they do own will have a 5.4 percent lower value.”
The brief’s key finding was that, “if today’s working-age households had the same level of student debt as those recently leaving college … an additional 4.6 percent of households would be at risk of having inadequate income in retirement.”
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