This report provides an in-depth look at student loan borrowing in the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area. As of March 1, 2018, approximately 735,000 Bay Area student loan borrowers (12.2 percent of the adult population) owed a collective $26.6 billion in student debt, with an average balance of $36,243. Nationally, total student loan debt climbed to $1.46 trillion by the end of 2018, more than doubling in size in the past decade, making it now the second largest source of consumer debt.
Although the Bay Area has a lower prevalence of student loan debt than California (13.9 percent) or the U.S. (17.9 percent), our research finds that Bay Area and even county-level trends mask dramatic disparities among communities throughout the region. Analyzing student loan debt at the zip code level finds wide variance in borrowing and loan balances, and considerably higher delinquency and default in low-income communities and communities of color.