Explain and Paraphrase Data and Methods We analyze the unique 2007 to 2009 panel of the Survey of Consumer Finances to examine the relationship between student loans and financial stress. The SCF is a series of nationally representative household-level cross-sectional surveys conducted every 3years beginning in 1983 (The Federal Reserve Board of Governors 2018). The Federal Reserve took advantage of the timing of the 2007 wave right before the start of the Great Recession, and re-interviewed respondents in 2009 to understand how the crisis affected households. The re-interview rate was nearly 89 percent, resulting in a sample of 3,862 households, with nonresponse not strongly correlated with observable characteristics (Kennickell 2010). Our analytic sample includes all households in the 2009 recession survey. We analyze recession experiences with measures from the 2009 survey, based on pre-recession circumstances collected on the same sample from the 2007 survey