Ranked: Median Student Debt for a U.S. College Degree

According to the Federal Reserve, student loans added up to $1.6 trillion in Q2 2023, making them the third largest category of U.S. household debt behind auto loans ($1.8 trillion) and mortgages ($12 trillion). The current student debt figure represents a 40% increase from a decade ago, resulting in greater pressure for the federal government to do more to help debtors. For example, on Oct 4. 2023, the Biden administration announced an additional $9 billion in student debt cancellations, bringing the total relief amount to $127 billion.

With student debt becoming a broader social issue, we’ve visualized data from the Education Data Initiative to show you the median debt per major for a bachelor’s degree in the country.

From this dataset we can see that median debt for most Bachelor’s degrees is in the mid $20,000s range. Two outliers at the upper end are Behavioral Sciences ($42,800) and Religious Education($32,000), while at the lower end we can see Comparative Education ($13,000) and Cognitive Science ($18,100).

Comparative education is a social science that involves the study of education systems, processes, and outcomes across different countries or cultures.

Looking at this data from a broader perspective, we can also see some trends emerge based on field of study. For starters, most Arts and Humanities degrees fall in the upper half of the ranking, while the bottom quarter of the ranking appears to be largely made up of Social Sciences, Sciences, and various business studies.

See the full article at visualcapitalist.com