This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, May 30, 2018. I'm Keela Brown.

Student loan balances in the United States now top one.5 trillion dollars and that number has

grown rapidly in recent years. Do student loans really facilitate academic

achievement and success in the workplace and if so is it worth the costs in higher prices and the cost to

taxpayers in the form of defaults and loan forgiveness. Cato's Diego Zuluaga and

Neil McCluskey comment. So the first thing to mention is that student loan debt has been increasing steadily and quite rapidly since the early 2000s.

And as you say, it's past the and a half trillion dollar mark which exceeds existing

auto loan balances. It's a much smaller figure than mortgage debt which is in the 13-14 trillion dollar range, but we have to remember that in the case of mortgage debt,

you are backing that borrowing with collateral that often accounts for a significant value

of the loan taken out. So it's not necessarily a like-for-like

comparison because student loans don't have any collateral other than the future

earning power of the person borrowing. All right, so you know, what did it look like 10 years ago?

What did it look like 15 years ago, student loan debt?

Well it was about half the level or less than half the level in in 2005 than it is today a lot of it has had to do and maybe

Neil can comment on this as well with the and you know the entry into the higher education market of much larger numbers of

people so college participation is at record highs and it's been

encouraged both from the government and also it's you

know socially very favorably viewed upon and I think all of those things have

contributed to the to the rise in the nominal value of these loans.

Neil what has changed in how student loans get done in recent years that might have helped

drive this?

Well, there are a whole lot of things that drive student borrowing. There were, I'm sorry, not. there were

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