More than six years after the 2008 financial crisis, American families have reduced household debt by about $900 billion.
But one type of debt has been difficult to clear: student loans. That debt continued to grow during and after the downturn, and is now greater than both auto-loan and credit-card debt.
As of the end of 2014, outstanding student-loan debt topped $1.3 trillion. About $1.1 trillion of the total came from federal student-loan programs; the remainder was from private lenders.
Those figures, however, don’t include other means of financing a college education. For example, students whose parents take out home-equity loans, or students who use credit cards to foot tuition bills, are not included in the student-loan-debt total.
How much of the pie is missing?
No data have been gathered on alternative methods of financing college, so “it’s a hard market to gauge,” says Eric Pajonk, a spokesman for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. New research is underway to grasp the scale of alternative financing, he says, but there’s no timetable for when the results might be available.