Student Loan Debt in the United States

Higher education costs have skyrocketed in recent years. Adjusted for inflation, the average in-state tuition at public colleges and universities, once dependably affordable bastions for people seeking an undergraduate degree, has tripled over the last 30 years. During the same period, median wages have stagnated, but the value of a college degree, measured by future earnings, remains high.

As a result, students take on increasingly large student debt loads, but have less purchasing power when it’s time to start repaying them. Last month, the White House announced a targeted relief plan that will cancel up to $20,000 for eligible borrowers paying back loans held by the Department of Education.

The data, which was curated by EducationData.org, comes from the U.S. Department of Education. Total debt numbers are made up of the total federal student loans taken out in each state as of April, 2022. Excluding the District of Columbia, Maryland residents have the highest average student loan debt. Georgia is the only state outside of D.C. and Maryland in which average student loan debt is above $40,000. Ohio is the state in which people are most likely to have student loan debt.

Below are the two maps created for this project, representing the average student loan debt in each of the fifty states and the percent of the population that has any student loan debt.

We started this project in ArcGIS Pro. The workflow for moving our maps into more animation-focused software involved the  ArcGIS Maps for Adobe Creative Cloud  workflow, and then importing those Adobe Illustrator files and png images into Maxon's Cinema4D. We broke the map down to its composite parts, using the state boundary lines to drive the extrusion and allow each state to be cut out and elevated on its own, driving the height of those extrusions using color-coded png images and Esri's Terrain layer.

For more information on the process of moving a map from Pro into Illustrator, make sure to visit the "Making Of" StoryMaps for our previous projects. If you want to learn a little bit about how to turn the shapes in your Adobe Illustrator file into shapes in 3D space, you can check out Maxon's ArtSmart workflow for working between Illustrator and Cinema4D. With the correct layer structure and import settings, you can get a map moving in no time.

To check out all of our past map animations, you can visit our playlist on Esri's YouTube page. Check back regularly for new content, including more in-depth StoryMaps like this one, to learn about what goes into these maps and how you can leverage ArcGIS technology for your own projects.

If you have any questions about the methodology or subject matter of one of our animated maps, comments, feedback, or want to suggest a future topic for one of our animated maps, please fill out  this feedback form . Make sure to include an email address if you want a response from our team.