International Trends in Student Lending

Several volumes of study have recently been published on the subject of financing education. These could even be used as textbooks for a course on the funding of higher education, as they discuss current issues of this practice in meticulous detail. This paper is intended to provide an overview in a similar spirit, but in a narrower, yet very current area of the financing of education, namely student lending. This paper presents the most important student lending-related national statistics of OECD countries in a systematic form, and draws conclusions concerning the initiatives of the system of financing of higher education through a comparative analysis of those. This study seeks to answer the question of whether student lending in the future will play an increasing role in the financing of higher education, regardless of economic background. It arrives at the conclusion that if we strive to involve additional resources in higher education in large European countries with populations exceeding 20 million people, such as Germany or France, to an extent equalling approximately 1% of the GDP, the use of private funding is almost the only available option. If this is accomplished by increasing tuition fees, which is what the international models suggest, the market of student lending is projected to experience significant growth. However, the results of this process will become significant in the space of several decades.