Today's very high threshold for default rates allows tons of colleges to mask poor student outcomes and doesn't take into account the difficulty students are having with repayment itself. But moving beyond the extreme scenario of student default — which means a borrower has been unable to pay their loan back for at least 9 months in the case of federal loans — is important to developing a more nuanced understanding of post-graduation hardship.
"We should also be taking into account more than just loan default rates — we should be measuring the ability of student borrowers to make a dent in their principal, or whether their debt-to-income ratio is out of whack," Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at the think tank Demos, told Mic.
