February 16, 2024
Keio University
A research team including Project Lecturer Jie Wang (Sociology of Education) of the Institute for Economic Studies, Faculty of Economics, Keio University, and Professor Hideo Akabayashi (Applied Economics) of the same faculty has examined the impact of student loan debt on family formation among young people. While loan-based scholarships support access to higher education, concerns have been raised about their impact on the life events of young people due to their nature as debt. For the first time in Japan, the research team used data from the "JHPS Second-Generation Follow-up Survey (JHPS-G2)," jointly collected by the Panel Data Research Center (PDRC) and the Center for Research on Equality of Opportunity for Children (CREOC) at the Institute for Economic Studies, to analyze the impact of loan-based scholarships on marriage and childbirth using nationwide data. The results quantitatively revealed the impact of scholarships on family formation, showing that, particularly for women who received two-year higher education, the group that received loan-based scholarships had delayed marriages and fewer children compared to the group that did not. This indicates the need to consider the impact on family formation when designing scholarship systems.
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