California student debt among lowest in U.S.

Here's one survey colleges in California should feel proud to rank consistently low on: the average debt of their graduates.

In 2008, an estimated 48 percent of students graduating from four-year public and private schools in California had debt, and their loans averaged $17,795 per person. Only six states had lower average debt.

Nationwide, about two-thirds of students graduating in 2008 came out with debt, averaging $23,200, up from $18,650 four years ago, according to a study released Tuesday by Berkeley-based Project on Student Debt.

The national numbers came from a survey of students conducted every four years by the federal government. The government does not break out debt for all states or individual schools. To get those numbers, the Project on Student Debt used unaudited data filed voluntarily by 922 public and private nonprofit schools, about half of all such schools.

In the four years the group has been doing its study, California has ranked in the bottom 10, thanks in part to the Cal Grant entitlement program for low-income students and "a tradition of trying to price public education affordably," said Lauren Asher of the Project on Student Debt.

Whether this continues depends on whether Cal Grants can survive budget cuts and whether financial aid keeps up with steep tuition and fee increases.

Debt at California's public universities ranged from roughly $11,000 to $18,000.

In California, the college reporting the highest average debt - $60,268 - was Cogswell Polytechnical College, a small private Sunnyvale school specializing in digital media.

"We don't have a large endowment" to provide financial aid and "to keep the tuition structure down, we don't do a lot of discounting," said Cogswell President Chet Haskell.

The California college with the lowest reported debt, $9,871, was the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

"We have an endowment that lets us limit loans in the financial aid package," says Don Crewell, Caltech's director of undergraduate financial aid. When the endowment suffered a hit last year, rather than cut need-based aid, the private school eliminated merit scholarships for incoming freshman and annual nonrenewable merit scholarships for continuing students.

This article appeared on page D - 4 of the San Francisco Chronicle