Where Most Students Borrow and Few Can Pay Down Their Debt

This post was updated on 3/20/17 to reflect repayment rates revised in January 2017

The U.S. Department of Education recently released new data on college costs, outcomes, and debt in conjunction with their College Scorecard – a helpful tool for students and families and a treasure trove of data for analysts.

We took a look at the data to find some of the schools where debt problems are particularly severe: the schools at which the majority of students borrows, and a minority of borrowers is paying down their debt three years into repayment. We identified nearly 1,500 schools that met these criteria. For-profit colleges make up 70% of the 1,478 schools. Of the remaining 447 colleges that meet these criteria, 247 are nonprofit colleges and 200 are public colleges. These data are detailed in the table below, and a list of the 1,478 schools is available here.