If The Student Loans Don't Break You, The Rent Will

Luxury developers are driving up housing costs around public university campuses

- Ali Breland

In 2015, Sabrina Martinez got into the University of Texas at Austin, the UT system’s flagship campus and its most selective. She was thrilled. Her parents, not so much. “They were just like ‘Nope. You can’t afford it. You shouldn’t go. Loans are ridiculous.’ ” They encouraged her to go to the cheaper University of Texas at El Paso, to which she could commute while living at home. “But I clicked ‘accept’ on my admission anyway,” she says, figuring that attending UT Austin’s lauded journalism school would lead to more internship opportunities and, ultimately, a job after she graduated.

Martinez’s parents are divorced. Her mother works as a teacher and receives child support from her father, who works in the oil fields of West Texas. Her family always had money for necessities, Martinez says, but with her two younger siblings to take care of, there usually wasn’t much left over for luxuries. That meant paying for college fell squarely on her shoulders.

Even with student aid, a $5,000-ayear scholarship, and some income from a part-time job on campus, Martinez has had to take on far more debt than she expected. She’s hardly alone: Average student debt has climbed from about $11,000 in 1990 to around $35,000 in 2018. The cost of tuition at public colleges roughly tripled in that time, to $10,270, but that’s far from the only expense forcing students to take on loans. In a 2015 analysis, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development found that “housing costs [are] likely a significant portion” of individual student debt. At UT Austin, the median annual rent in the neighborhoods closest to campus exceeds the annual in-state tuition—about $11,000 for the coming academic year—even without including other costs such as utilities and groceries.