Responsibility or Liability?: Student Loan Debt and Time Use in College

Recent research shows that student loans may affect persistence and completion among undergraduates, but few have examined the association between debt and everyday college experiences. We use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen to assess the relationship between student loan debt and the foundation of campus life—time use. On a basic level, we find that debt is related to students’ time spent on activities such as working for pay, consuming media, and athletics. We then focus on results from a latent class analysis, which suggest that college activities coalesce into three distinct student lifestyles that are differentially associated with debt. Although many debt-free students develop active non-academic agendas in the “Socially Engaged” lifestyle, indebted students may exhibit one of two divergent types: the “Serious Students,” who spend their time on academics and working for pay, or the “Inactive,” who are comparatively uninvolved in campus life. These patterns suggest that either student loan debt is a stratifying mechanism for students’ college experiences, or that it acts as a proxy for students’ selection into particular time use patterns.