New Hampshire’s college graduates leave school with more debt than those of any other state, according to a new study that delivers a series of body blows to the illusion that the state encourages its kids to go to college.

New Hampshire is also among the nation’s grayest states, with a higher percentage of our residents age 65 and older than almost any other state, and a shrinking base of younger residents.

It doesn’t take a social scientist to see trouble coming.

Among the findings of the new study, conducted by PolEcon Research on behalf of the New Hampshire Higher Education Assistance Foundation:

• Students in New Hampshire graduate with an average debt of $32,440, the most in the nation.

• Only three states have a lower rate of its high school graduates attend an in-state college In fact, a higher percentage of our students attend private colleges than any other state. Many of those colleges have some of the highest tuitions in the country.

• Even if a high school graduate wants to stay
in-state, tuition and fees at the state’s public colleges are higher than anywhere but Vermont. Some places would call that “a disincentive.”

• New Hampshire ranks dead last in state support for public colleges. In fact, even if the money were almost doubled, it would still rank second-to-last.

• Because New Hampshire ranks in the top 10 in per-capita income, many families qualify for little, if any, scholarship aid for their children. That “middle-class squeeze” means they must often resort to loans, which handicap their ability to buy a home, car and raise a family.

It seems fair to ask whether we’re driving our young people away by making the cost of attending in-state colleges prohibitive. With the state’s population aging, it’s crucial that we replenish the economy’s labor force with younger, educated workers – preferably not saddled with thousands of dollars in debt.

It would be easy to conclude that New Hampshire is just plain cheap when it comes to funding higher education, and that might be the case.

But PolEcon Research’s Brian Gottlob cautions against trying to pin the student debt issue on a single problem. “There are a variety of reasons; they are all complex, and they are all interconnected,” he said.

As much as higher education administrators might want to use the study to argue for more institutional funding, this is not a problem the state can make disappear by throwing money at it.

There’s a perception out there that colleges engage in an arms race when it comes to spending money. Administrative salaries tend to be the most prominent examples of that. As The Telegraph detailed in our Degrees of Debt series about a year ago, some administrator salaries climbed nearly 50 percent in the previous 10 years, while the cost of attendance went up more than 100 percent.

Apologists for the status quo argue that we pay our college administrators less than the national average for similar positions, and that’s true. But that’s little consolation to parents straining to send their child to college, or to recent graduate facing a crushing debt load in a tight job market. Especially when those administrators seem unable or unwilling to rein in the costs that drive tuition out of reach for many.

There may be no easy answers, so we’ll throw out a question and maybe they’ll take it up when college officials, lawmakers and other interested parties gather next month for a roundtable discussion to consider higher education funding challenges: What has to happen for the people who do the actual paying to catch a break?

Because it seems to us that higher education ought to mean a system of colleges that the state can not only be proud of, but one that its residents can afford.

Cities like Nashua aspire to attract young, educated workers and challenge them to Dare to Begin here, yet our higher education system seems to do the opposite.

We just hope that the last college-educated millennial in New Hampshire remembers to turn out the lights.

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