Latinos, Student Debt, and Financial Security

Abstract

Over the past 15 years, states have made deep cuts to their funding for higher education, causing tuition to rise rapidly, and household incomes have failed to keep up. As a result, student debt has skyrocketed, quintupling from just $240 billion in 2003 to more than $1.3 trillion today. The burdens of this debt-based higher education system are being disproportionately borne by those with the highest hurdles to obtain higher educations: students of color and low-income students. This factsheet provides key data on Latinos and student debt, depicting both the outsized effect of student debt on Latinos, and illustrating why reforming our higher education system to enable students to pursue a degree without mortgaging their futures is so important to young Latinos.