October, the month of Halloween, is beginning with a scary new report on student loan defaults.

The latest numbers on federal student loans show that one in ten borrowers are defaulting within two years and nearly 15 percent are defaulting within three years. Michael Stratford of Inside Higher Ed offers these details:

The rate at which borrowers of federal student loans default on their debt within two years after beginning repayment rose for the sixth consecutive year, reaching its highest level since 1995, according to data released Monday by the Education Department.

One in ten borrowers across the country, 475,000 people, who entered repayment during the fiscal year ending in September 2011 had defaulted by the following September, the data showed. That’s up from 9.1 percent of a similar cohort of borrowers last year.

Even more borrowers are struggling in delinquency when the period of measurement is extended to three years. The percentage of borrowers defaulting within three years after beginning repayment has also risen from 13.4 percent to 14.7 percent for the most recent cohort of borrowers available (those who entered repayment from October 1, 2009 to September 30, 2010 and had defaulted by September 2012). The 14.7 percent default rate represents 600,000 borrowers.

The default rate is used by the Education Department to potentially cut funding to institutions that have high large proportions of borrowers defaulting on their loans. Colleges are currently barred from receiving federal student aid money if their default rates are 25 percent or higher for three consecutive years or if they exceed 40 percent in a single year.

The Education Department is in the process of transitioning to using only the three-year default rates. Next year will be the first year for which institutions will face penalties based on their three-year rates, which student advocates say is a welcome change since the measurement will be more expansive. Still, though, some argue that the cohort default rates don’t reflect the full burden of debt that students borrow.

“Even at schools where lots of students borrow, [default rates] don’t tell you how many students are behind on payments, overloaded with debt or defaulting after more than three years,” Debbie Cochrane, research director at The Institute for College Access & Success, known as TICAS, said in a statement. TICAS has also issued reports about how colleges are manipulating their default rates to be lower than they actually are by combining programs or pushing students into unnecessary forbearances.


 
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