Collateral Damage - Paul Fain, Inside Higher Ed

Students at a community college in rural Texas may lose access to federal aid because of a student-loan default measure Congress expanded mostly to keep an eye on for-profit institutions. Frank Phillips College is among several two-year colleges whose leaders are worried about how their institutions will fare with this fall’s release of the first batch of sanction-bearing numbers under the revised federal-loan default rate. The U.S. Department of Education now tracks defaults among federal loan recipients for three years after they leave college. Two-year rates had previously been the standard. But the U.S. Congress inserted the expanded “cohort default rates” into the 2008 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, which is the law that governs federal financial aid. http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/04/03/online-education-provider-2u-disband-semester-online-consortium