Why for-profit colleges didn't appear on last week's debt report
After I ran a few posts and charts last week on this years' Project on Student Debt report and an interpretation of the Minnesota data, Minneapolis College of Art and Design spokesman Rob Davis pointed out this part of the report:
A Note on For-Profit Colleges
Private for-profit colleges are not included in the lists
of high- and low-debt colleges or in the state averages
because so few of these colleges report the relevant debt
data. Debt figures for the Class of 2010 are available for
only five of the 471 private for-profit four- year colleges
in the U.S. that awarded bachelor’s degrees during the
2009-10 year, about the same low level of participation
as the previous year. For-profit colleges do not generally
respond at all to the Peterson’s survey used to collect the
data we use in this report. (For more about this survey see
page 10.) The most recent nationally representative data
show that almost all graduates from for-profit four-year
colleges (96%) took out student loans, and they borrowed
45 percent more than graduates from other types of fouryear
colleges.*
* See Quick Facts about Student Debt (http://projectonstudentdebt.org/files/File/Debt_Facts_and_Sources.pdf) for more information.
(MCAD was reported among the Minnesota privates whose students have the most debt.)
The message (as I understood it)?
Don't forget the for-profits. Students from for-profits have a much higher debt load, but because those schools don't participate in the report, they're flying under the radar.
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