Following up on my earlier post on the financial burdens of college graduates, I should point out that the Project on Student Debt also has detailed data for individual colleges, public and private, in each state. A few highlights for Massachusetts:

The most indebted students in the Bay State were from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where graduates in 2007 owed an average of $37,784 in student loans (up from $34,409 the year before). The annual tuition in 2006-07 was $33,318.

The other institutions with average student debts exceeding $30,000 (counting only those students who had debts) were Assumption College, Atlantic Union College, Becker College, Bentley College, Emerson College, Pine Manor College, and the Wentworth Institute of Technology. But only 56 percent of Emerson College graduates had any loans to repay; in the other schools, at least 63 percent of the students had debts (putting them at or above the state average).

The lowest average debt was at Hellenic College ($7,300). The only other schools below $10,000 were Harvard University, Newbury College, and Williams College. The Project for Student Debt notes that Harvard and Williams “have financial aid packages that are specifically intended to minimize student debt, especially for students from low- and middle-income backgrounds.”