Discussions of higher education quality almost always treat institutions monolithically. As such, we raise concerns about whether University of Phoenix students are well prepared or Clinton Hill Junior College’s student loan default rate as if every department and degree is the same. While it is easier to discuss colleges and universities as undifferentiated entities, doing [...]
All Posts Tagged: 'Cohort Default Rates'
Cohort Default Rates: FFEL vs. DL
When asked by the Chronicle of Higher Education why the chain of for-profit schools he oversees had such a high three-year cohort default rate, Arthur Benjamin, the chief executive of ATI Career Training Center, cited the fact that his institutions did not provide loan counseling after two years. What’s funny about that explanation is that [...]
Semantics and For-Profits
Daniel Bennett over at the Center for College Affordability and Productivity has an item concerning this post from Monday about how for-profit colleges, or market-funded institutions (more on that in a second), make up a disproportionate share of borrowers and students who default. While he agrees with my suggestion that for-profits should publicly take on [...]
Cohort Default Rates: Putting For-Profits In Perspective
A number of posts today have discussed how for-profit institutions fare poorly when viewed through a three-year cohort default rate calculation. But here’s a chart that should hopefully underscore the extent of the problem that default performance of for-profit institutions represents.
What this chart shows is that for-profit institutions enroll about 7 percent of the students, [...]
Cohort Default Rates: Who Changed the Most?
As I noted earlier, one result of the new trial three-year cohort default rates are that all sectors have higher average default rates than they did under the two-year measurement window. But these rates also represent a summation of all schools in a given sector, obscuring those who either had very small gains or huge [...]
Cohort Default Rates: Who Could Be Punished and Who Should Be Thanking Lobbyists?
As part of an agreement with for-profit college lobbyists to allow the cohort default rate measurement to increase from two to three years, the new formula requires schools to record three consecutive years of default rates above 30 percent in order to face sanctions—a 5 percentage point increase over the previous threshold. An analysis of [...]
Cohort Default Rates: Bad News All Around, Worse at For-Profits
When the proposal to expand the cohort default rate measurement from two years to three first came out, for-profit colleges protested vehemently that the new metric would paint them in an unfavorable light. A look at the new trail three-year rates released today by the U.S. Department of Education reveals that they certainly had reasonable [...]
Cohort Default Rates: An Introduction
The federal student loan system is primarily focused on getting aid to students and doing so at a reasonable cost to the taxpayer. But the flipside to providing tens of billions of dollars in annual federal assistance is that there needs to be some sort of mechanism in place to ensure that subsidized loans and [...]
The Merits of Culinary School
Last week, the New York Times, ran a higher education-focused section of Education Life. Contained within that package was an article on continuing education for people attending culinary school. In general, I’ve always lumped culinary and journalism school into the same category of paying a lot of money for a degree in something that’s best [...]
Student Loan Debt and Cohort Default Rates at For-Profit Institutions
Last week, the U.S. Department of Education released updated institutional cohort default rates, a measure that tracks how many of a school’s borrowers default on their loans within two years of graduation. For the second consecutive year, the average rate for all institutions increased, going from 5.2 percent to 6.7 percent. In aggregate, 225,444 borrowers [...]
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
03/11/10 | Kevin Carey is quoted on the rising costs of education in The Economist.
03/10/10 | Chad Aldeman's False Fronts paper is quoted on Accuracy in Academia.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on Federal Family Education Loan defaults on The Huffington Post.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on loan origination on the Firedog Lake blog.
03/07/10 | Kevin Carey calls for a Race to the Top in higher education in a column in The Chronicle of Higher Education.