Add a student-loan story to your slate

By Flickr user jennifercw

With just a few weeks till a new semester starts at thousands of academic and trade schools nationwide, it’s a good time to take a look at the downside of the retraining wave that is sweeping the U.S. as millions of displaced workers look for new careers.

The topic of student loans is vast and controversial, and you’ll need to it into digestible chunks in order to write lucid stories.

This will get you started: A fascinating angle via an AP story last week nothing that more than one in five borrowers who attended for-profit schools are now defaulting on their loans.

This data begs a number of questions: Are loans oversold?  Are the credentials and degrees from these institutions not improving the borrowers’ earning power?  Are they accepting students with poor prospects for success?

Detailed information about the default rates is available here at the Federal Student Aid data center.

Here’s a link a previous post of mine about tracking trends in trade schools – it offers a variety of links and resources for covering the increasingly high profile for-profit academic world, including the publicly traded educational firms.

An invaluable resource is the Student Lending Analytics blog highlights a number of trends and issues; invaluable for people who aren’t accustomed to working with education department reports.  One recent entry you’ll want to scan shows how your state ranks in student loan default rates; be sure to read the methodology caveats.

And do note the SLA has an e-mail sign-up; a must if you’re going to track this beat.

The National Center for Education statistics may come in handy when you’re fleshing out charts and graphics.

The Quick and the Ed blog also parsed the for-profit figures and will give you ideas for more local insight.

This NJToday.net piece includes some interesting background and pointers to sources.

From the personal finance angle, you want to tell your money-strapped readers about their options and about the consequences of stopping payment on student loans – which like tax debts cannot be wiped clean via bankruptcy.

Here’s the Department of Education’s borrowers’ guide to federal student aid collections.

Also, FinAid.com has a plethora of links to programs that offers student loan forgiveness and repayment for grads who take on a variety of public service roles, here and abroad, or those who choose to practice professional skills (law, teaching, medicine) in under-served regions.

Don’t overlook the online pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education;  it’s a great site to mine for trends, issues and some financial data. A headliner article talks about drop-outs, which of course heightens the loan-default risk.

And while not relevant to the for-profit tuition issue, I can’t resist pointing you to this interactive map at the Chronicle’s site; it offers a snapshot of state-by-state higher education budget cuts over the past couple of years.  Tighter purses at these colleges and universities may be a factor in more students choosing for-profit schools.