SoFi Blog

SoFi At Work and the American Bar Association (ABA) designed a student loan relief scholarship contest to help three members pay off a portion of their student loan debt.

As an HR professional, you’re likely aware that many of your millennial and Gen X employees struggle with student loan debt. The average 2016 graduate has student loan debt of $37,172. Nationally, that debt is now over $1.4 trillion, which is more than the total credit card debt of all Americans.

Last summer, we surveyed 1,000 working professionals for The Impact of Student Loan Benefits, SoFi’s most recent white paper outlining the effect of student loan debt on employee recruitment, engagement, and retention. And what we found was telling: Employees want help alleviating the financial pressure of their student loan debt balances. In fact, just over 60% of respondents said that student debt is one of the top two most stressful financial burdens in their lives.

Luckily, student loan refinancing exists, and many millennial and Gen X employees are taking advantage of it. But what is it, and how does it help?

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.

A company’s success is partially driven by how well it anticipates the future. But even a top HR manager clinging to a Magic 8 Ball can’t foresee the next hot job trend. One thing is clear, though: as a generation of baby boomers readies to retire in the next 10 to 15 years, companies must not wait to attract top candidates who will grow into tomorrow’s top leaders.

Unique talent acquisition techniques are key for recruiting today’s sharpest millennial minds. While we don’t know what will entice job seekers in 2025, we do know that today they’re greatly focused on benefits packages.

For SoFi’s millennial members, Twenty One Pilots’ hit “Stressed Out” is more than a good song—it’s an anthem. And this lyric says it all: “Out of student loans and treehouse homes, we all would take the latter.”

How could it not? Roughly 70% of 2016 college graduates borrowed to get their degrees, leaving them with a whopping $37,172 in student loan debt, up from about $35,000 in 2015.