Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Education
released the first draft of cohort default rates for students who graduated or left school in the 2008 federal fiscal year (10/1/07 through 9/30/08). The results aren’t pretty—according to the data, 7.2 percent of borrowers defaulted within two fiscal years of entering repayment. This is an increase of 0.5 percentage points above the 2007 cohort and a jump of 2 percentage points over the 2006 set.
The chart below shows the default rates over the last three cohorts by sectors.
Borrowers from public and nonprofit institutions each had a slight increase in their default rates, but the biggest jump by far occurred at for-profit schools, which had a 0.9 percentage point gain.
