Not all opinion pieces in the New York Times are anonymous and about the White House. Ben Miller, senior director for post-secondary education at the Center for American Progress, wrote a NYT article on the fact that “The Student Debt is Worse than we Thought”. National Center for Education Statistics show that the typical student borrower will take out $6,600 in a single year, averaging $22,000 in debt at graduation.
American HE institutions are kept accountable by government for the student debts defaults of their students; this is normally assessed three years after the students leave the institution. But Miller shows that the 10% default rate of defaulting students after three years actually increases sharply in later years to almost 16% after 5 years. The proportion of HE institutions with high student default rates increases even more sharply from 2.1% after 3 years to 13.1% after 5 years.
The for-profit HE institutions do worst, also when looking at the 5 year period – climbing to a student debt default rate of almost 1 out of 4. Leaving American tax payers to pay the for-profit dividends.
