Category: Data

While the debt burden current students and recent graduates face may not be as difficult as aggregate student debt levels might suggest, there’s one final point worth making about student debt in Canada. As we reported, student debt levels in the 2000s increased somewhat, but not as much as you might have thought. Notably, university debt didn’t keep pace with increases in tuition, likely owing to significant federal and provincial investments in student grant programs. Yet averages tend to obscure

As we saw yesterday, while student debt at graduation has been increasing, falling interest rates have meant that monthly student debt payments have made up a smaller share of a graduate’s income in recent years. Of course means and medians only tell part of the story. While it may be true that the average borrower was better off in 2007 than in 2002 despite graduating with more debt, the same can’t be said for every borrower. As Figure 1 points