A recent study co-authored by sociology professor Jason Houle analyzing the causes of “boomeranging,” which refers to students living in their parent’s home post-graduation, found that there is no correlation between student debt and returning home, among other conclusions.
Houle has worked on several research projects that focus on the psychological and sociological aspects of young adult indebtedness.
Neil Kamath ’17 is currently working with Houle on a manuscript relating to risk preferences in the context of young adult debt use. Kamath described Houle’s work as an attempt to change current negative conversations about debt.
“Professor Houle seeks to rewrite the narrative and try to understand debt use as a way to invest in yourself for the future,” Kamath said.
Both Kamath’s work with Houle and the recent boomeranging study use data from the U.S. Department of Labor’s National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a set of surveys designed to gather information on significant life events and to study young adult behavior, Kamath noted.
This particular study on boomeranging had four key findings, Houle wrote in an email.
First, the representative sample of young adults does not demonstrate much evidence that student loan debt increases the risk of living at home post-graduation.
Second, the effect of student debt proved to be stronger in black youth than white youth.
In general, blacks borrow money for college at much higher rates than whites, because black students often come from socially disadvantaged families. This is a distant effect of slavery, as well as more contemporary forms of discrimination, Houle wrote.
Black youth are more likely than white youth to have private loans for college and discrimination also exists in the labor markets for recent graduates, Houle wrote.
Dartmouth’s director of financial aid Dino Koff agreed that federal and institutional loans are easier to pay off than private loans.
Federal loans allow more flexibility by providing repayment options that allow students to defer loans or base their payments on their income, he said.
Dartmouth’s graduating loan debt is significantly below the national average, which has a lot to do with the availability of institutional loans, Koff said.
Some sociologists have referred to student loan debt as “predatory inclusion,” Houle said. This term refers to the idea that minorities that appear to have gained access to higher education have done so only on unequal and unfair terms.
Kamath’s work with Houle did not find a strong race component in the data, but the research did look at the effect of socioeconomic factors on debt repayment. These included parental net worth and parent education levels, Kamath said.
The third finding of the study was that college completion is a strong predictor for boomeranging. In fact, whether or not a student completed college correlates much more with returning home than student debt does.
This finding was surprising because the study’s initial aim was to focus on the effects of student debt, co-author Cody Warner wrote in an email.
Those who do not complete college have a similar experience in the labor market to high school graduates, who have very minimal success, Houle said.
The final finding was that young people’s post-college plans played an important role. Those who had transitioned into adult roles — such as marriage — were far less likely to return home.
This last finding was likely the least surprising one, Houle said.
The study aimed to answer the question of whether or not student loan debt is a crisis. The findings suggest that student loan debt pays off for certain groups of students, but not for others. It runs the risk of reproducing or even enhancing existing racial inequalities, Houle said.
