At 500 Colleges, 4 in 10 Borrowers Aren't Paying. Look Yours Up Before You Sign.

If you are about to sign loan paperwork for a program that starts in January, there is a free federal spreadsheet that tells you what share of your school’s borrowers stopped paying. Check it first. It takes two minutes.

The Education Department published a nonpayment rate for every institution in its loan portfolio. Five hundred schools came back at 40 percent or worse.

Here is the part that matters. Of those 500, 424 are private, for-profit colleges. Fifteen are public. The remaining 61 or so are private nonprofits.

That is not a rounding difference. That is a sector.

The averages make it plainer. For-profit colleges run 33 percent nonpayment. Public colleges run 16 percent. Private nonprofits run 15 percent. Those are the Department’s own numbers, from the Department’s own file.

A nonpayment rate is harder to spin than the statistics schools like to quote. It isn’t a graduation rate, which a school can lift by graduating people into nothing. It isn’t a placement rate, which a school gets to define. It counts borrowers who are more than 90 days late, default included, out of everyone who entered repayment between January 2020 and May 2025. Roughly 17 million people.

They took the loan. They left. They aren’t paying.

NPR’s Cory Turner went through the file and pulled names. UEI College: about 55 percent, across 32,000 borrowers. Miller-Motte College: about 50 percent, across 37,000. Florida Career College: about 67 percent, across 28,000. Legends Barber College, a small one, at 81 percent.

“These numbers are really jaw-dropping,” Eileen Connor of the Project on Predatory Student Lending told NPR.

Now the useful part, because a scary number you can’t act on is just anxiety.

Open studentaid.gov/data-center/student/portfolio and find the file named Nonpayment Rates by Institution. Search your school. If your number is over 40 percent, two in five people who borrowed to attend are behind or in default, and you are about to join that pool on the same terms they did.

That is not proof the school is bad. Plenty of open-enrollment schools serve students with thin safety nets, and that shows up in the data. So don’t treat the number as a verdict. Treat it as leverage. Walk into admissions and ask one question: what happens to people who finish this exact program, and how do you know?

A school with a good answer will have it ready. A school that pivots to how “affordable” the monthly payment is has told you something.

Then run the payment yourself before anybody runs it for you. Our loan calculator will show you what the balance actually costs per month, and the education hub covers borrowing limits and repayment plans. Do that math at the kitchen table, not at a desk with a pen already in your hand.

One more thing worth knowing. This is a different file from the earnings accountability rule we covered on September 1, which measures what graduates earn and can cut a failing program off from federal loans entirely. That one asks whether the degree paid. This one asks whether the borrowers did. Check both. A school can look fine on one and ugly on the other.

The government has been sitting on this data the whole time. It finally put it where you can read it. Read it.

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