The U.S. student loan debt is characterized as a debt crisis in this country. Currently, about 45 million Americans hold more than $1.7 trillion in student loan debt. Of that, about 92% is backed by the American taxpayers. Cumulative student loan debt is the second largest category of consumer debt after mortgages, which struck me as being pretty crazy. While tuition is what we normally think of with student loan debt, there’s also the cost of other things that students need, such as housing, food, books, and supplies, and all of those things go up in price every year, which contributes to the problem. It’s not a simple issue, but there is some movement to try to fix some of the problem. Because it’s impossible for people to escape student loan debt in most cases, the lenders that offer the student loans have little motivation to assess the creditworthiness of the people that they lend to. In other words, the lenders don’t need to underwrite these loans as they would if they were assessing someone for a mortgage, for example, where they would look at…Read More