10.6.1: African American Student Debt

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A study of college graduates for the years 2015 and 2016 focused on the amount of debt that students had undertaken to finance their education (Baum 2019). The particular focus of the study was on African American students who are more likely to borrow than students from any other racial or ethnic group. The article also focused on how this problem is often concealed when race is not considered with student debt.

Frequency distributions of the amount of debt by race and ethnicity are given in Table 10.18. Each row of this table is a frequency distribution where only the percentages are reported. For white students the highest frequency occurs at no debt, but substantial percentages remain throughout all the classes. The trend is very similar for Hispanic students. For Asian students the trend is very different. The largest frequency by far is for no debt with these students, with the remaining frequencies being much smaller. The trend for African American students is much different in that the largest frequency is for having the most amount of debt. The is concerning because it is generally African American families who have the fewest economic resources.

Table 10.18 Frequency distributions of debt by race for students earning a bachelor's degree for 2015–2016 graduates. Adapted from Baum (2019).

	Amount Borrowed
Race or Ethnicity
No Debt	$1 to $9,999	$10,000 to $19,999	$20,000 to $29,999	$30,000 to $39,999	$40,000 or more
White	30%	10%	13%	18%	12%	18%
African- American	14%	12%	10%	15%	16%	33%
Hispanic	33%	14%	15%	15%	10%	13%
Asian	41%	11%	14%	16%	9%	9%
All	29%	11%	13%	17%	12%	18%

The last row in the table is the frequency distribution for the combined data of all races. Note that this frequency distribution is much closer to that of Hispanic and white students, and the overburden for African American students is completely lost. This is an example of Simpson's Paradox.

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