Education loan repayment: a systematic literature review

Abstract Education is a significant contributor to human capital. Financial assistance for education through institutional loan serves as the key element for human development, and loan repayment without default makes the education loan product self-sustainable. The systematic review aims to study the various articles related to education loan repayment (ELR) using bibliometric analysis approach and R studio software with the help of biblioshiny package. The study analyses 812 articles published in the Scopus database between 1990 and 2022. The review identifies most relevant authors, most cited articles, publication trends, keywords and themes, and trending topics. The review finds that research in the domain of ELR is at an increasing trend with a growth rate of 7.2% and, in the year 2022, the highest number of scientific publications, that is, 72 articles, was published. The review exhibits that existing research in the field has mainly focused on themes such as repayment burden, financial literacy, financial education, student debt, income, mental health, and loan defaults. The study concludes that highly cited work in educational loan repayment is in the field of medicine, highlighting salary as the key factor for educational loan repayment, and loan repayment is incentivized by the federal government to serve the designated underserved areas through service option loan repayment programs. Methods on designing and marketing new approaches to loan repayment can be researched in future with relation to human resource recruitment and retention by the employers.