Bachelor’s degree-holders enjoy homeownership more frequently than associate degree-holders do, and both bachelor’s- and associate degree-holders who graduate without any student loan debt enjoy home ownership at higher rates than their counterparts who graduate with debt.
Those are some of the key takeaways from new data presented this week by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, or the New York Fed.
Dr. Rajashri Chakrabarti, a senior economist in the Microeconomic Studies Function at the New York Fed, said the data show that college degree completion matters.
“Completion matters a lot. Graduation matters a lot,” Chakrabarti said. “If you take on student debt and you graduate, you actually do better than students who did not graduate, even better than students who did not take on debt and did not graduate.
“It’s important to graduate and that makes a lot of difference, at least in terms of the metric we looked at, which is home ownership.”
Chakrabarti presented statistics that show that, by age 33, those who graduated from college with no debt owned homes at a rate above 45 percent, whereas those who graduated with debt owned homes at just under 45 percent. Those who did not attend college owned homes at a rate of between 25 and 30 percent.
Bachelor’s-degree holders had higher home ownership rates regardless of debt status. For instance, bachelor’s-degree holders with student loan debt owned homes at a rate of above 45 percent, besting associate-degree holders without debt, who owned homes at a rate of just above 40 percent.
