When Lily Huynh graduated from the University of Texas in 2019, she left campus with a degree in psychology and about $26,000 in student debt.
Even after working 20 hours a week during part of her time in school and occasionally having sleep for dinner, Huynh said she needed the loans to pay for rent and for expenses such as textbooks.
There’s no way I would have been able to go to college without taking out the loans that I had, Huynh said. Honestly, the only option I could have done to avoid this is to have gone to a different school.
Huynh’s experience is not uncommon. Texas college students had a significant amount of unmet financial need during fiscal 2020, and hundreds of thousands of students have accrued student loans to pay for college, according to a draft report by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.
The board, which oversees higher education in the state, plans to consider adopting the statewide report on student financial aid in higher education during its quarterly meeting on Thursday. The report provides an overview of financial aid provided to undergraduate and graduate students as well as the amount of student loan debt obtained by students in the state.
However, Texas undergraduate residents at four-year universities still have an average unmet need of $11,928 after subtracting the support from grants; tuition exemptions and waivers; loans; and work-study programs, the report states
According to the report, Texas residents received $11 billion in student financial aid through federal, institutional, private and state funding during fiscal 2020, but the money still wasn’t enough to cover the high costs of college for many students in the state.
She has managed to pay off about $5,000 in interest on the loan, but she still will likely be making payments until at least 2040
The average cost of attendance for a public, four-year university in the state based on tuition, fees, room and board and other expenses was $24,882.
At two-year colleges and private colleges, students also have thousands of dollars in unmet need. Undergraduate resident students at public two-year institutions had an average of $9,940 in unmet need, while the average unmet need for students at private or independent institutions was $15,965 during fiscal 2020.
Vanessa Sansone, a UT-San Antonio assistant professor of higher education, said having enough money to payday loans Bradford attend a university is a major predictor of whether someone will choose to go to college and graduate.
Sansone, who studies college affordability and how it affects underrepresented students in higher education, said students who don’t have their financial aid needs met, especially in communities of color and low-income communities, may choose not to attend college or may go directly into the workforce in a field that doesn’t require a college degree.
Students are making hard choices based upon their personal finances, Sansone said. They may be making choices to pursue more technical vocational fields, which is perfectly fine. But in terms of how one can make a pathway towards higher social mobility, depending on what industry they’re in, it may not be as sustainable.
Many Texas students who attend college are relying extensively on federal financial assistance to afford it, including Pell grants and student loans, the report says. During the 2019-20 academic year, 37% of Texas students had student debt, and 58% of students in their fourth year of pursuing a bachelor’s degree had student debt, with an average of $23,584 in debt.
There are minimal differences between the total student debt obtained by gender, but the data reflect stark disparities in debt among racial and ethnic groups. The report says 79% of Black students had student debt by their fourth year of college, while only 52% of white students had debt during the 2019-20 academic year.
Black college students had the highest average of total student debt obtained by their fourth year of university compared with all other demographics, with an average of $27,539 in debt. In comparison, during the same year, the average amount of debt was $24,904 for white students, $20,527 for Hispanic students and $18,573 for Asian students.
Stella Flores, a UT-Austin associate professor of higher education and public policy, said loans might be the only option for people, including low-income families, to pay for college and make up the unmet need.
The problem with loans is that if an education is not continued, then there’s not going to be a payoff to that debt, Flores said. Colleges need to invest more resources in the college experience to make sure students finish their journey so they can pay back their loans.
In the aftermath of the pandemic, Flores said unmet need is going to be astronomical for some families. Despite the economic recovery, she said it might be impossible for some students to afford college, considering heavy job losses during the pandemic and lack of access to affordable health care.
Affordability now is deeply, profoundly tied to the health care system, its capacity and the local economy, Flores said. What does that mean? That means things were already hard before for many students. And now it’s going to be much harder because the family’s adaptability to the pandemic is just something we’ve never dealt with before.