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At a time when jobs are scarce, it should come as no surprise that higher percentages of students are defaulting on their college loans. Default rates increased from 5.9 percent to 6.0 percent at public institutions, and from 3.7 to 4.0 percent at private colleges and universities, new U.S. Department of Education data show.
The news was worse at for-profit colleges, where the default rate rose from to 11.0 percent to 11.6 percent, according to a story in Bloomberg News and a press release from the U.S. Department of Education. For-profits have been under increasing fire lately. In a recent investigation, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found fraud or deceptive marketing practices at all 15 of the for-profits it scrutinized.
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