As an undergraduate at Christopher Newport University, Kelcie Chandler did not know that there was a significant difference in how much debt women and men hold after graduating from college. But she did notice that her female classmates were much more likely to talk about their debt than were the men she knew.
Women talked about “what kinds of jobs they were getting, and the pay for those jobs, and being concerned about whether or not they can pay rent, and pay for their groceries and their car payment, and also student loans.”
One question, she noticed, was on a lot of female students’ minds — “Am I going to be paying off these debts until I die?” Though the question may have been posed hyperbolically, it does reflect the daunting task students face upon graduation.
Learn how enrollment of men, women, foreign students, and the various racial and ethnic groups is distributed among colleges. The 31 tables and charts in this section also explore online learning, student-loan debt, graduation rates, and degrees.
Lately, much of the worry about whether colleges have fallen short with one gender has concentrated on men, who do not attend or succeed in college at the rates that women do. “Often people will look at the fact that there are more women enrolling in college nowadays as a sign of gender progress and that we’ve solved any gender-inequity issue in postsecondary education,” says Barbara Gault, vice president and executive director of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.
But how well colleges serve women is surfacing as another major concern. Even though they dominate in college enrollment and have higher six-year graduation rates, they are not reaping the same financial rewards from finishing college, or from earning more-advanced degrees, that men do. In May, the American Association of University Women called national attention to the issue when it reported that women hold almost two-thirds of the nation’s student-loan debt, nearly $900 billion of the $1.4 trillion total, with black women holding the highest average debt of any racial, ethnic, and gender group among graduates who completed bachelor’s degrees.
“We think of education as being the great equalizer,” says Kimberly Churches, chief executive of the AAUW. But the disproportionate amount of debt for women, along with the long-recognized wage gap between women and men, can make it fall short of that ideal for many women, she says.
Gault notes that the wage gap affects not only how long it takes women to pay back their loans, but how much they are able to earn during college so they can limit the amount they borrow.
One factor contributing to the disproportionate debt load is that women are more likely to attend colleges with higher costs than are men. Almost twice as many women as men attended for-profit colleges in 2016, for instance. Gault points to the aggressive online recruiting of women by for-profit colleges, with their emphasis on the more-convenient structure for people with children, a need more common to female students than male.
“But often the quality of the degree the student ends up getting, if they even finish, is much lower in a for-profit college,” Gault says, “so their ability to pay back a loan is going to be more difficult.”
When Chandler and her mother were planning how to pay for her college education at Christopher Newport, a public institution, it seemed as if they had no option but to take out loans. Chandler estimates that she owes around $25,000 for her student loans, and that her mother owes about an equal amount in Federal Direct PLUS Loans for parents. An AAUW analysis of U.S. Department of Education data found that women’s mean cumulative debt upon graduation in 2016 was $21,619, compared with $18,880 for men.
“My loans, to me, aren’t really that high compared to what a lot of people have,” Chandler says, “but it’s a pretty significant burden when they’re asking for $150 a month out of your paycheck.”
Christopher Newport, like many other universities, provides basic counseling from the Office of Financial Aid. Parents are offered a session on financial aid during orientation, and Chandler says she was required to go through online exit counseling before graduation. Once she completed the online counseling, she recalls, the reality of how much was being asked of her truly began to sink in.
The only other advice Chandler remembers receiving on how to handle her student debt came from a supervisor at her on-campus job as a resident assistant. The supervisor gave advice on budgeting, but, more importantly for Chandler, talked about different professions in which she could get her loans forgiven after a certain number of years of repayment.
Chandler, who graduated in May with a degree in social work, works as a probation officer in Norfolk, Va. She has been told many times that her chosen career path doesn’t pay very well, and that has made her attentive to ways to lessen the burden of her debt. Thanks to her supervisor’s advice, she is aware of the opportunities for loan forgiveness in social work. As a resident assistant during college, she didn’t have to pay for room and board, and she valued those savings, along with the work experience she gained.
“There were some tough situations that I had to handle when I was an RA, and I thought, ‘Should I continue this?’ a couple times. But I think what really held me to that position at the end was really the fact that I didn’t want to lose the room-and-board waiver.”
Even knowing that fields dominated by women tend to pay less than fields dominated by men, Chandler saw social work as the right choice for her. “I’m a strong female, but I know that I would struggle if I was in a very male-dominated field. So I think that it was beneficial for me to learn from strong female leaders how to own my space.” Social-work professionals often have to deal with difficult clients and situations, she says, and “seeing other strong women being able to do that was really beneficial.”
One of the ways women can increase their salaries is by attaining more-advanced degrees, but Chandler says she hesitates to rack up more debt unless she sees a clear direction. Women earned nearly 60 percent of all master’s degrees in 2015-16, and just over half of doctorates.
The pursuit of such degrees brings up another facet of the financial disparity between men and women. “Women with degrees, on average, tend to make as much as the men with the degree beneath them,” says Gault. She is also quick to note that every degree, on average, pays off for women.
“We need to be able to encourage women to go into relatively high-paying graduate fields or graduate programs at the same rates that men are, and there are a number of fields where that’s not happening,” says Gault. “The suggestion is that part of the reason that women aren’t going, or they tend to leave without finishing, is that some of the environments in graduate programs in STEM or in economics are not welcoming or even are harassing environments.” Those fields, says Gault, could benefit from providing young women with more female mentors and instructors, who can be “powerful advocates for culture change to really make a difference.”
Churches and Gault have both reflected on what steps the government, society, and colleges could take to reduce the debt burden on students. Pell Grants and other federal student aid, for instance, could take into greater account the costs for low-income independent students who are raising children while attending college, and colleges could play a more proactive role in finding state or institutional aid for students with such expenses, Gault suggests.
More counseling, both of them say, can help students understand the full picture of their debt and give universities a better sense of their students’ financial situations. Colleges could also redouble efforts to encourage women to consider higher-paid, male-dominated fields and teach skills like salary negotiation. Gault points, for example, to the declining number of women going into technology jobs. “Whose responsibility is that, exactly?”
Colleges could approach the gender gap in student debt the way businesses are encouraged to approach the wage gap at their companies. Internal audits would allow college officials to get a clearer picture of what their female students are facing and to think of the success of their female students “as a metric of their own success that they need to invest in to really achieve equity,” Gault says.
Churches explains that such steps can help college officials understand how their implicit biases might be leading them to miss the problem “right in front of their face.”
Gault says, “Hopefully now, in this Me Too era, we’re gaining a greater awareness of the extent of the issues and the severity of the issues that might be inhibiting women’s success.” That, she says, “puts us all in a better position to take bolder steps toward solving problems.”
Ruth Hammond contributed data analysis for this article.
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