Do You Live in the State with the Lowest Student Loan Debt?

Student loan debt among new graduates is reaching astronomical levels. The latest estimates show that it’s topped $1 trillion and it’s not slowing down anytime soon. It’s gotten so bad that there’s only one state in the US where the average student owes less than $20,000. The Huffington Post’s College section has all of the details.
New Mexico currently has the lowest average student loan debt with approximately $18,656 per student making it the only state in the Union to fall below the $20,000 threshold. That means the rest of the states aren’t doing a good job of keeping that debt down to a reasonable level at all. New Hampshire has the highest student loan debt rate with an average amount of $32,795 per graduate, according to figures compiled by the U.S. Department of Education.
The basic problem is that colleges keep jacking up their tuition prices along with necessary expenses such as textbooks and housing forcing students to take out more and more loans at higher and higher rates. It also doesn’t help that states are funding higher education less and less and private and for-profit schools are charging even more astronomical rates just to get a degree, only 22 percent of which obtain a degree from a for-profit college that accounts for 12 percent of the national student loan debt. Those numbers are only going to get bigger as lenders keep finding customers to straddle with debt and the government continues to remain moot on the issue. This is getting ridiculous. Just how high does the debt have to get before someone steps in and puts a stop to it?