Daniel Pink  pointed to this research paper which suggests:

Those paying for college with loans perform significantly worse than students receiving other forms of aid.

Why is this? It may be because of increased financial pressures, or stress about the future, perhaps debt is a trailing indicator of some other instability, or it may be caused by many factors.

We don’t need to know the ‘why’ to understand that if we’re headed toward large volumes of debt we need to pump the breaks and really calculate if it is worth it. As educational institutions, we need to dig deeper to provide alternatives to debt.