Bankruptcy on the rise among college graduates
When most people think of bankruptcy, they probably think of lower-income workers with lower levels of education. Increasingly, however, this is not the case. In fact, in today’s economy, beset by economic woes, the number of high-income and college-educated bankruptcy debtors has steadily risen.A study conducted by the Institute for Financial Literacy looked at over 50,000 bankruptcy debtors across four years, 2006 to 2010. Over those years, the rate of debtors with a college degree was found to have increased by 20 percent.
Moreover, the percentage of high-income debtors was also found to have risen significantly over the course of the study. To illustrate, in 2006 – the first year of the study – only 5.5 percent of bankruptcy debtors earned more than $60,000 annually.