College graduates with moderate debt more civically engaged than debt-free peers

This paper looked at whether having student loan debt influences college graduates’ civic engagement, and whether effects differ depending on what their major was. Author Osasohan Agbonlahor reused data from the College and Beyond II (CBII) Data Series, available from the ICPSR Member Archive. CBII contains student-level data on bachelor’s-seeking undergraduates enrolled in 19 public institutions from 2000 to 2021. Agbonlahor specifically used the College and Beyond II Alumni Survey because it collected information from a subset of CBII respondents in 2021, ten years after graduating and earning their bachelor’s degrees. It not only contains information about their college course contents and activities, for both liberal arts and non-liberal arts students, it also supplies details about their student loan debt and their post-college life outcomes. She analyzed a sample that included 1,673 college graduates, 63 percent of whom were liberal arts majors. She found that graduates with monthly loan payments of $201 to $500 were more civically engaged than those with no debt, particularly in political activities like voting and campaign work, with the strongest effects among liberal arts graduates. She also identified a “sweet spot,” where debt equaling 10 to 15 percent of income maximized civic participation, suggesting that moderate financial pressure may drive political action and democratic participation, rather than limit it.

August 21, 2025