These are the schools driving America’s student loan crisis. [View all]

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These are the schools driving America’s student loan crisis.

Wonkblog

By Jim Tankersley and Danielle Douglas-Gabriel September 10 at 1:00 PM

In August 2014, network technicians opened a special connection between computers at the federal departments of Education and Treasury. On nights and weekends throughout the month, that connection delivered to Treasury some 46 millions of pieces of information about student borrowers in the United States, including their financial situations when they started and left college, their incomes after school and whether or not they kept up with their loans.

After taking pains to protect the privacy of individual students, Treasury's deputy assistant secretary for tax analysis, Adam Looney, and a Stanford University economics graduate student named Constantine Yannelis began sifting the loan data for patterns. They wanted more information on what many political leaders have dubbed an economic and educational crisis in the United States - a spike in the number of students who have defaulted on their loans in recent years.

“It was just constant amazement," Looney said in an interview. "You see things for the first time. It is very hard to see what’s going on in the loan market from published statistics and what you can find online."

What they saw was less of a national crisis than a very localized one: The surge in defaults was largely concentrated among relatively older, lower-income students who attended for-profit colleges.
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