Premium
Paying back student loans: Demographic, human capital and other correlates of default and repayment difficulty
Author(s) -
Pizarro Milian Roger,
Zarifa David,
Seward Brad
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
higher education quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.976
H-Index - 42
eISSN - 1468-2273
pISSN - 0951-5224
DOI - 10.1111/hequ.12248
Subject(s) - human capital , demographics , student loan , logistic regression , default , loan , demographic economics , government (linguistics) , actuarial science , economics , empirical research , survey data collection , work (physics) , business , finance , economic growth , demography , sociology , medicine , mechanical engineering , linguistics , philosophy , statistics , mathematics , epistemology , engineering
Government‐sponsored student loans have emerged over the decades as a primary method of financing post‐secondary education across most North American jurisdictions. Despite this, the empirical literature examining the correlates of repayment difficulty and default in Canada has remained stagnant in recent years. This study taps into an underutilised data source—the 2013 National Graduates Survey—to examine the relationship between demographics, human capital, borrowing behaviour and other known predictors and repayment difficulty. Our logistic regression models demonstrate that disability status, geographic region and borrowing behaviour are correlated with loan default and repayment difficulty, while failing to verify the existence of other demographic effects routinely found in the existing literature. We discuss the implications of these findings, along with multiple avenues for further empirical work on this topic within Canada.