SoFi Blog

Equities have stumbled over the past several days and interest rates have fallen alongside the dollar. The main impetus for the move was a failed attempt by the new administration and Republican members of the House of Representatives to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.

With the rise of millennials and Generation Z grads, the workforce is rapidly changing. Young, educated professionals bring a lot to employers for sure—like energy, enthusiasm, and a thirst for innovation. But these days, they also come with some financial baggage: high levels of student loan debt. That debt can be crippling and distracting, and on top of that, it’s also an obstruction to both short- and long-term financial goals.

It’s no secret that organizations directly feel the impact of the hardship. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ (PwC) 2016 Employee Financial Wellness Report, 28% of 1,600 full-time U.S. employees surveyed admit that personal finances cause them to be distracted at work—up from 20% in 2015. Among those workers, 46% spend three or more hours a week, while at work, dealing with or thinking about their financial situations, compared to 37% in the previous year. Yet few HR teams are taking steps to address the problem effectively and help their employees—and their company’s ROI.

In this first part of our new series on employee wellness, recruitment, and engagement, we at SoFi want to provide actionable insights on how to better understand the financial burden of student loan debt that these employees face, and what to do to help ease the pressure through financial assistance, education, training, and support.

Interest rates have continued to rise while equities tread water as a March rate hike by the Federal Reserve became a certainty. Today the FED raised rates ¼ of one percent or 25 basis points. Attention has now shifted to any information that can be gleaned from Chair Yellen and the rest of the FOMC on the likely pace of hikes for the rest of the year.

Concerns about the rising cost of college in the United States—and the $1.4 trillion in student loan debt nationwide—are alive and well.

And they’ve prompted a lot of discussion about the different ways our educational peers nearby, across the pond, and beyond handle student loan repayment programs. When it comes to tuition costs and paying off student loans, the American system is unique—and not for all the reasons you might think.

It turns out that cheap or even free tuition doesn’t mean the end of student loans. Student loans are common even in countries with free tuition, because no matter where you go to college, you have to live somewhere and, of course, eat.

Sweden gets a lot of attention because tuition there is free. Still, Swedish students borrow money for college just as frequently as Americans do—and about 70% of students in both countries have student loans. But Swedish students graduate with about $20,000 in debt, compared to about $30,000 for American graduates.

To explore how the rest of the world pays for learning, we looked at the most recent QS World University Rankings. Thirty-two of the top 100 schools are in the U.S. Another 32 are found in just four countries: the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and Canada. Below, we compare the way higher education is financed in all five nations, in descending rank order.

A preponderance of solid economic data has sent equity markets higher as they brush aside the political risk stemming from a chaotic new administration. Focus has shifted back towards the Federal Reserve and the outlook for monetary policy after several weeks in which expectations of tax cuts and infrastructure spending captivated markets. We continue to like a globally diversified equity portfolio and short duration fixed income.