Special Topics Graduate Student Research Presentation

Joey Brown

Sociological work surrounding questions of debt has focused on the middle class, people filing bankruptcy, and more recently, young Americans transitioning to adulthood. From work on young adult transitioning into adulthood, we have learned that debt loads among young Americans have changed across cohorts over the past few decades. There is little change in the amount of debt young adults carry, but debt loads, or debt to asset ratios, are higher for young adults today than in the past.  Further, middle class young adults increasingly have borrowed more in student loan debt over time. While this work informs us about how young people are economically fairing compared to previous cohorts, it does not consider how economic contexts may differ and change for people of various racial and ethnic groups. This paper fills this gap by using nationally representative data to describe how debt levels and loads differ across cohorts of black and white young adults.