WASHINGTON – When it comes to finding ways to better enable students to repay their student loans, making sure students actually earn a degree probably yields the biggest bang for the buck.
That’s one of the main conclusions that a group of higher education experts drew from a new report released Thursday that provides a more detailed look at the problem of delinquency in student loan repayment.
The report titled – Delinquency: The Untold Story of Student Loan Borrowing – was prepared by the Institute for Higher Education Policy, or IHEP, a Washington, D.C.-based organization, which concentrates on issues that impact college access and success for low-income, minority and other under-represented student populations.
The report focuses on a distinct group of student loan borrowers that panelists at the New America Foundation said deserves more attention – those who become delinquent in repaying their student loans but have not yet defaulted.
One of the panelists at the D.C. think tank, Alisa Cunningham, Vice President of Research and Programs at IHEP and author of the report, said that this group of borrowers represents a forgotten middle who are on the verge of becoming defaulters.
“There’s a false dichotomy between default and no-default, when really there’s a lot in the middle,” Cunningham said. “This is a very big group. For every borrower that defaulted, we found two more that were delinquent without default.
She was referring to the 26 percent of students who entered repayment in 2005 that the study found were delinquent in repaying their student loans, compared to the 23 percent who sought deferments or a forbearance, and 15 percent who had actually defaulted.
