Useful Stats

Total student loan debt in the United States increased 558% from the first quarter of 2003 to the second quarter of 2024, increasing from $240 billion to $1.58 trillion, according to Federal Reserve Bank of New York data. However, as seen in Figure 1, the rate of change has remained essentially flat since the first quarter of 2021, coinciding with a dip in undergraduate enrollment and federal loan forgiveness programs totaling nearly $160 billion, as the U.S. Department of Education reported.

Figure 1. Total student loan debt increased from $240 billion to $1.58 trillion between the 1st quarter of 2003 and the 2nd quarter of 2024.

With the release of the Economic Development Administration’s (EDA) 2024 Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for its Build to Scale program, time has begun ticking towards the October 28 application deadline. To assist organizations with determining eligibility under EDA’s Equity Investment Priority, SSTI has developed a map visualizing counties that are either rural or in persistent poverty, made public through SSTI’s Technology-Based Economic Development (TBED) Community of Practice (CoP).

Figure 1: Rural and Persistent Poverty Map with Engines and Tech Hubs overlay

The educational landscape of the United States has undergone significant transformation over the past three decades, with the percentage of individuals 25 and older having earned a bachelor's degree steadily increasing since the 1990s. Nationwide, 20% of those aged at least 25 had a bachelor’s degree in 1990, while in 2021 this figure jumped to 38%. However, educational attainment varies greatly across states. Many states, such as Massachusetts, Maryland, Colorado, New Jersey, and Rhode Island, alongside 15 other states, fall above the national value of 38% in 2021. However, a total of 30 states fall beneath the national value.

Below, Figure 1 maps out this data for select years between 1990 and 2021; clicking on any year beneath the title will adjust the data visualized. Note that all years operate under the same quintile scale, meaning that data points across all years were used to create five equal groupings, each representing a fifth of the data.

In 2000, the United States was among the global leaders in educational attainment, boasting the third-highest percentage of its 25- to-64-year-old population with a postsecondary degree across the 38 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations. However, over the past two decades, the U.S. has gradually slipped in the rankings, falling to ninth place by 2022 even as the percentage of the population with a postsecondary degree increased from 36% to 50%. As international competitors like Japan, Canada, South Korea, and the United Kingdom continue to outpace the U.S.’ growth, the U.S. faces many challenges in maintaining its competitive edge in an increasingly educated world.

Figure 1, below, illustrates the percentage of each nation’s population aged 25 to 64 having attained any postsecondary degree (undergraduate degree or higher) across all OECD nations in select years from 2000 to 2022.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury has made multiple announcements about the State Small Business Credit Initiative (SSBCI) in recent weeks, including new program approvals, providing an update on uses of funds through the first two years of the program, and highlighting venture capital success stories, and releasing a database of participating lenders. In addition to covering these updates below, SSTI is collecting Treasury’s resources in revised SSBCI tracking pages.

SSTI updates to SSBCI tracking

SSTI has been tracking SSBCI program data and information in “Useful Stats” articles; earlier this month, SSTI updated “Useful Stats: SSBCI 2.0: An overview of state uses of funds” with new Capital Program data, including program-specific data for South Carolina and Guam.

Coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, the median net worth of Americans jumped an inflation-adjusted 37%, from approximately $141,000 to $192,000, representing the largest increase reported across available data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). Breaking net worth down into its two main components, assets and debts, shows that while debts have increased, the sharp rise in assets—both financial and nonfinancial—has driven these numbers. When separating Americans into the self-employed and those employed by another person or company, interesting trends are revealed; self-employed individuals have higher median and average net worths, and, in 2022, for the first time ever, lower median debts. The old adage, it pays to be your own boss, seems to hold.

This article uses data from the 2022 SCF, the most recent release. New editions of the SCF are published triennially and include information on families’ balance sheets, pensions, income, and demographic characteristics. All dollar values are inflation-adjusted to 2022 USD.

Led by increases in retail trade and professional, scientific, and technical services, the number of annual business applications nationwide has increased 119%, or nearly three million, from 2005 to 2023. However, the share of applications classified as high-propensity, or those more likely to result in businesses with a payroll, has decreased in all but the health care and social assistance sector, leading to a 26-percent point drop (58% to 32%) over the same period.

This article builds upon a prior SSTI article covering the same data, but examines which two-digit North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) industry sectors are generating more new business applications and which are declining. For a list of all NAICS sectors and their codes, refer to the NAICS Association website.

Business applications have greatly increased over the last two decades, jumping 119% from 2005 to 2023. However, the rate of high-propensity business applications—applications identified by the Census Bureau as having higher likelihoods of turning into businesses with payroll—have decreased as a share of all applications every year since 2005, despite having grown 22% over the same period. Breaking these numbers down by states shows uneven trends, with the difference in shares of high-propensity business applications in 2005 and 2023 decreasing by over 20 percentage points in most states.

While the growth of female-founded and co-founded companies has increased at a faster rate than those of male-founded and co-founded and mixed gender founded companies, it is still a smaller amount than the other two. Additionally, these companies are more likely to receive a higher proportion of deals occurring earlier in the VC pipeline.

Since 2014, companies founded or co-founded by a female have increased by the largest amount of any gender combination. Sixty percent of these founders have received a venture capital (VC) deal, according to SSTI analysis of PitchBook data. Across both male- and female-founded or co-founded companies, this figure drops to a relatively lower 29%, while those founded or co-founded by a male have increased 24% over the same period.

The measurements for success of female-founded and female-co-founded companies, while improving, remain lower than male-founded companies in number, deal count, and capital invested, according to PitchBook’s 2023 Annual US VC Valuations Report. PitchBook found that female-only-founded startups received just 2% of all venture capital (VC) dollars in 2023, while those female-co-founded reached 21% that year—a record high. SSTI analysis of PitchBook data finds that the number of VC deals to female-founded and female-cofounded companies has increased 58% over the past decade, yet despite reaching that milestone, they have been on a sharp downward trend since 2021.

Shrinking shares of job-creating, high-growth firms across the country, the topic of SSTI’s Useful Stats column in last week’s Digest, is not being experienced within all sectors of the economy, according to analysis of the Business Dynamics Statistics of High Growth Firms (BDS-HG) experimental dataset from the Census Bureau. From 1978-2021, the number of high-growth firms, measured by change in employment, has increased in five sectors, stayed the same in one, and decreased in the remaining 13 classifications of U.S. business and industrial activity. Slower-growth firms expanded their dominance of the economy, as all sectors experienced a decrease in the number of high-growth firms as a percentage of their total respective firms.

High-growth firms are often conflated with all other firms. Unfortunately, this tendency makes it extremely difficult to differentiate those with a higher likelihood of significantly impacting the economy and innovation. While reports like the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) have found increasing rates of entrepreneurship over the past decade, barring a drop at the onset of the pandemic, new U.S. Census Bureau data on high-growth firms reveals the opposite for the number of high-growth firms, with steady, significant decreases in the number and share of high-growth firms across the nation.