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Delayed gratification

So are the soaring costs of college keeping millennials from starting households of their own? Not according to a new paper from Jason Houle of Dartmouth and Lawrence Berger of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Using longitudinal data on college-going Americans who were aged between 12 and 17 in 1997, the authors found that student-loan debtors were in fact more likely than non-debtors to own a house by the age of 30. But this was mostly because debtors tended to be older, employed, married and with children, and the debt was largely irrelevant.