Education Commons^™

A Systems Approach To Student Loan Default, David J. Williams

Theses & Dissertations

Total U.S. student loan debt has now reached $1.6 trillion accumulated by approximately 45 million Americans. While viable options exist, many do not adequately know of them or how to act on them the outcome of which is that many people with relatively small manageable debt are defaulting. Beneficial, financial student loan programs are vastly underutilized for many reasons one of which is poor financial literacy. In this dissertation, I argue that acquiring financial literacy is a system challenge. The model to support this hypothesis posits a system with inputs, an internal transformation process, outcomes, and a feedback loop. The …