In a blog post last month, I used newly-available data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Federal Student Aid to look at the amount of student loan dollars in income-driven repayment plans by amount of debt. In that post, I showed that students with more debt were far more likely to use IDR than students with less debt, with students having over $60,000 in debt being about twice as likely to use IDR as those with between $20,000 and $40,000 in debt.
In this post, I want to highlight some other new data that provides interesting insights into the federal student aid portfolio. I looked at state-level data (based on current residence, not where they went to college) that shows outstanding balances and the number of borrowers for both all Direct Loans (the vast majority of federal student loans at this point) and for those enrolled in income-driven plans. I then estimated the average loan value by dividing the two. The data are summarized in the table below.
| All Direct Loans | Loans in IDR plans | ||||||
| State | Balance ($bil) | Borrowers (1000s) | Avg loan | Balance ($bil) | Borrowers (1000s) | Avg loan | |
| AL | 15.9 | 522.2 | 30,400 | 5.4 | 100.0 | 54,000 | |
| AK | 1.7 | 59.9 | 28,400 | 0.6 | 10.3 | 58,300 | |
| AZ | 21.2 | 711.9 | 29,800 | 7.7 | 137.1 | 56,200 | |
| AR | 8.5 | 312.9 | 27,200 | 3.0 | 62.0 | 48,400 | |
| CA | 102.8 | 3307.3 | 31,100 | 36.7 | 600.2 | 61,100 | |
| CO | 20.4 | 662.1 | 30,800 | 7.7 | 133.6 | 57,600 | |
| CT | 12.1 | 414.6 | 29,200 | 3.4 | 59.6 | 57,000 | |
| DE | 3.1 | 101.2 | 30,600 | 1.0 | 17.4 | 57,500 | |
| DC | 5.0 | 102.2 | 48,900 | 2.4 | 25.7 | 93,400 | |
| FL | 65.7 | 2063.1 | 31,800 | 26.4 | 473.1 | 55,800 | |
| GA | 45.8 | 1350.2 | 33,900 | 16.6 | 279.2 | 59,500 | |
| HI | 3.1 | 104.5 | 29,700 | 1.1 | 18.2 | 60,400 | |
| ID | 5.3 | 191.7 | 27,600 | 2.1 | 41.6 | 50,500 | |
| IL | 45.7 | 1439.7 | 31,700 | 14.9 | 247.9 | 60,100 | |
| IN | 21.6 | 794.7 | 27,200 | 7.3 | 152.3 | 47,900 | |
| IA | 10.4 | 405.8 | 25,600 | 3.3 | 67.8 | 48,700 | |
| KS | 9.2 | 339.5 | 27,100 | 2.9 | 57.6 | 50,300 | |
| KY | 13.8 | 507.1 | 27,200 | 4.9 | 102.6 | 47,800 | |
| LA | 14.1 | 499.1 | 28,300 | 4.9 | 95.2 | 51,500 | |
| ME | 4.4 | 158.8 | 27,700 | 1.5 | 30.0 | 50,000 | |
| MD | 25.1 | 707.2 | 35,500 | 8.3 | 123.5 | 67,200 | |
| MA | 23.1 | 783.7 | 29,500 | 7.0 | 114.3 | 61,200 | |
| MI | 37.9 | 1262.4 | 30,000 | 13.2 | 243.4 | 54,200 | |
| MN | 19.9 | 709.9 | 28,000 | 6.7 | 124.4 | 53,900 | |
| MS | 10.6 | 360.7 | 29,400 | 3.8 | 75.2 | 50,500 | |
| MO | 21.0 | 707.2 | 29,700 | 7.6 | 143.5 | 53,000 | |
| MT | 3.0 | 106.5 | 28,200 | 1.2 | 23.1 | 51,900 | |
| NE | 5.7 | 216.9 | 26,300 | 1.9 | 37.8 | 50,300 | |
| NV | 7.5 | 262.9 | 28,500 | 2.8 | 51.6 | 54,300 | |
| NH | 4.7 | 165.2 | 28,500 | 1.4 | 26.2 | 53,400 | |
| NJ | 29.7 | 999.5 | 29,700 | 8.4 | 145.1 | 57,900 | |
| NM | 5.3 | 189.3 | 28,000 | 2.1 | 39.7 | 52,900 | |
| NY | 67.9 | 2113.1 | 32,100 | 24.0 | 387.8 | 61,900 | |
| NC | 32.7 | 1065.5 | 30,700 | 11.8 | 213.6 | 55,200 | |
| ND | 1.8 | 75.1 | 24,000 | 0.6 | 12.0 | 50,000 | |
| OH | 45.4 | 1577.1 | 28,800 | 16.0 | 313.8 | 51,000 | |
| OK | 10.3 | 383.0 | 26,900 | 3.6 | 71.5 | 50,300 | |
| OR | 14.9 | 475.8 | 31,300 | 6.1 | 107.7 | 56,600 | |
| PA | 46.1 | 1539.3 | 29,900 | 15.1 | 275.3 | 54,800 | |
| RI | 3.3 | 119.6 | 27,600 | 1.0 | 18.8 | 53,200 | |
| SC | 18.2 | 584.7 | 31,100 | 6.8 | 123.5 | 55,100 | |
| SD | 2.6 | 98.9 | 26,300 | 0.9 | 17.9 | 50,300 | |
| TN | 21.3 | 700.7 | 30,400 | 7.8 | 146.0 | 53,400 | |
| TX | 76.5 | 2772.1 | 27,600 | 26.1 | 516.4 | 50,500 | |
| UT | 6.9 | 256.8 | 26,900 | 2.7 | 47.3 | 57,100 | |
| VT | 2.1 | 66.4 | 31,600 | 0.8 | 13.1 | 61,100 | |
| VA | 29.9 | 913.8 | 32,700 | 10.1 | 166.0 | 60,800 | |
| WA | 20.1 | 674.8 | 29,800 | 7.4 | 128.0 | 57,800 | |
| WV | 5.4 | 200.3 | 27,000 | 1.8 | 37.0 | 48,600 | |
| WI | 17.0 | 646.6 | 26,300 | 5.7 | 114.5 | 49,800 | |
| WY | 1.2 | 45.3 | 26,500 | 0.4 | 8.0 | 50,000 | |
Nationwide, the average outstanding Direct Loan balance was right at $30,000, with significant variation across states (ranging from $24,000 in North Dakota to $48,900 in Washington, DC). The average outstanding balance in IDR was $55,800, which suggests that many borrowers in IDR attended graduate school in order to accumulate that amount of debt. State-level average IDR balances ranged from $47,800 in Kentucky to an impressive $93,400 in Washington, DC. California, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Vermont, and Virginia all had average balances over $60,000—and they are all high cost of living states with high percentages of adults obtaining graduate or professional degrees.
Once again, kudos to the Department of Education for slowly releasing more data on the federal student loan portfolio. But there are still quite a few important data points (such as school-level data or anything on PLUS loans) that still aren’t available to the public.
Robert Kelchen 
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