The treatment group consists of traditional students-those who entered college immediately or very soon after high school and attended a public 4-year university. Care should be taken when extrapolating our results to the general population, which includes many individuals who enrolled in a private or public 2-year university or who first attended college later in life. If such individuals respond to debt much differently than traditional students, we do not capture this heterogeneity of treatment effect in our estimates.
The sample is all individuals from a nationally representative cohort of 2331-year-old individuals with credit records in 2004 after applying the filters described in sec
D. Instrumental Variable Estimation Results
First-stage results from regressing student debt on the instrument and other controls are presented in Table 3. Across specifications, a $1,000 increase in the sum of average tuition across the 4 years after the individual turned 18 is associated with an approximately $150 increase in student loan debt for students in the treatment group. The estimates are strongly statistically significant, with F-statistics far exceeding typical rule-of-thumb thresholds for linear models in all our specifications except column 1 (which does not include any control variables) and column 7 (which drops anyone who did not attend college from the control group). For reference, after controlling for state and cohort fixed effects, the residual of the 4-year sum of in-state tuition has a standard deviation of $915 across our sample.
The sample is all individuals from a nationally representative cohort of 2331-year-old individuals with credit records in 2004 after applying the filters described in sec
| Variable | Total Federal Student Loans Disbursed before Age 23 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Full Sample | No Pell(6) | PSE Only(7) | |||||
| (1) | (2) | (3) | (4) | (5) | |||
| Instrument: tuition ? ever public 4 year | .089* | .158*** | .157*** | .157*** | .156*** | .202*** | .099** |
| (.048) | (.040) | (.039) | (.039) | (.040) | (.040) | (.046) | |
| Tuition | .173*** | .034*** | .053 | .025 | |||
| (.034) | (.012) | (.061) | (.056) | ||||
| Ever public 4 year | 5.555*** | 1.497** | 1.548** | 1.545** | 1.553** | ?.333 | 2.498*** |
| (.781) | (.667) | (.662) | (.661) | (.674) | (.729) | (.735) | |
| No college | ?2.103*** | ?2.066*** | ?2.064*** | ?2.078*** | ?2.866*** | ||
| (.352) | (.345) | (.345) | (.344) | (.404) | |||
| Associate’s/certificate | ?.014 | ?.067 | ?.063 | .014 | ?.823 | ?.037 | |
| (.552) | (.543) | (.543) | (.548) | (.621) | (.555) | ||
| Bachelor’s | 3.214*** | 3.261*** | 3.265*** | 3.331*** | 1.726*** | 3.335*** | |
| (.611) | (.603) | (.602) | (.613) | (.589) | (.616) | ||
| Master’s or more | 4.061** | 4.288** | 4.282** | 4.356** | 2.579 | 4.417** | |
| (1.869) | (1.857) | (1.852) | (1.840) | (1.920) | (1.841) | ||
| Degree of unknown type | ?.093 | ?.166 | ?.153 | ?.015 | ?.801 | .001 | |
| (.874) | (.877) | (.881) | (.872) | (1.202) | (.860) | ||
| Ever public 2 year | ?2.580*** | ?2.477*** | ?2.473*** | ?2.499*** | ?2.086*** | ?2.427*** | |
| (.262) | (.261) | (.261) | (.259) | (.325) | (.262) | ||
| Ever private 4 year not for profit | 8.303*** | 8.303*** | 8.305*** | 8.294*** | 7.326*** | 8.199*** | |
| (.323) | (.307) | ( getbadcreditloan.com/payday-loans-wa/.307) | (.310) | (.302) | (.300) | ||
| Ever private 2 year not for profit | 1.867** | 1.861** | 1.872** | 1.854** | 2.683*** | 1.791** | |
| (.854) | (.850) | (.850) | (.857) | (.983) | (.833) | ||
| Ever private for profit | 1.871*** | 1.945*** | 1.944*** | 1.938*** | 3.814*** | 1.936*** | |
| (.522) | (.530) | (.530) | (.529) | (.456) | (.547) | ||
| Ever Pell | 4.155*** | 4.120*** | 4.122*** | 4.109*** | 4.109*** | ||
| (.218) | (.220) | (.220) | (.221) | (.234) | |||
| Constant | ?.587 | 1.587*** | .942 | 3.537** | 2.092*** | 2.865*** | .627 |
| (.413) | (.365) | (1.233) | (1.473) | (.294) | (.340) | (2.584) | |
| College major controls | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Home state economic controls | No | No | No | Yes | No | No | No |
| Home state and cohort fixed effects | No | No | Yes | Yes | No | No | No |
| Home statebycohort fixed effects | No | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Observations | 33,435 | 33,435 | 33,435 | 33,435 | 33,310 | 26,399 | 17,927 |
| F-statistic | |||||||
| R 2 | .138 | .379 | .384 | .384 | .363 | .311 | .261 |
Note. Columns 13 use the same specifications as in Table 2. Column 4 includes local economic controls (average weekly wages, unemployment rate, and CoreLogic house price index) measured at the home state level when individuals were 22 years old. Column 5 builds on col. 3 by adding home statebycohort fixed effects. Column 6 repeats the analysis in col. 5 but restricts the sample to individuals who did not receive Pell Grants before age 23. Column 7 repeats the analysis in col. 5 but restricts the sample to individuals who attended any postsecondary schooling before turning 23. III. Student loans disbursed and tuition are recorded in thousands of 2014 dollars. Standard errors are in parentheses (clustered at the home state level). PSE = postsecondary education.