Biggest Offender in Outsize Debt: Graduate Schools

Yale, for example, has a highly ranked master’s of fine arts program. The admissions criteria are rigorous and include the submission of a portfolio of work that the faculty evaluates. The average debt for master’s of fine arts students at Yale turns out to be $21,573 — a significant but manageable sum in a field that doesn’t offer the gold-plated salaries of, say, investment banking.

The Academy of Art does not evaluate student portfolios for admission to graduate school, or for its large undergraduate programs. Its success in placing graduates into jobs in their field is unknown, because the university doesn’t disclose that information. Its M.F.A. graduates earn only about $35,000 year. On average, they borrow more than $85,000. (The typical debt for an M.F.A. graduate nationally is around $45,000.)

Joe Vollaro, executive vice president of financial aid and compliance at the Academy of Art, said the university provides students with loan counseling before and after they enroll. He added that the university is not legally allowed to limit how much money graduate students borrow from federal loan programs to pay for living expenses.

There are many more examples of the complicated, seemingly dysfunctional graduate school market. People don’t become social workers to get rich — most earn less than $50,000 per year — yet $109,486 was the average amount borrowed for a master’s in the subject at the University of Southern California.

That’s unusually high even though a large majority of the program’s students learn online. In fact, most of the $275 million in debt incurred by the roughly 2,500 people who earned a master’s degree in social work at U.S.C. in 2016 and 2017 didn’t go to the university itself. It was funneled to a publicly traded for-profit technology company called 2U, which provides marketing, recruitment, course design, clinical placement and advising services for online graduate programs, in exchange for which it receives 60 percent of all tuition revenue.

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Veterinarians are not extremely well paid: Half earn between $73,580 and $122,180 per year. Yet veterinary programs often graduate students with enormous debt burdens, a factor, some have speculated, in the abnormally high suicide rate within the profession. A number of high-debt veterinary schools are abroad. Ross University (St. Kitts), St. George’s University (in Grenada), and the universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Prince Edward Island all have vet schools that American students are borrowing over $230,000 on average from the federal government to attend.