NEW YORK – Brennan Taylor has a good job, but spending $200 on his daughter’s seventh birthday seems like “an awful lot.”
A 2002 survey of recent graduates by student loan company Nellie Mae found that the average student loan burden for a bachelor’s degree was $18,900, up 66 percent from five years earlier.
For UW-Madison students who took out student loans, the figure was $17,528 for the 2003-2004 school year.