“When borrowers don’t recertify on time, their payments will snap back to the amount they would have owed under a standard 10-year repayment plan – a jump of hundreds of dollars per month, in many cases”, said Seth Frotman, the CFPB’s acting student loan ombudsman.

One of the caveats that concerns UNG officials is that the data available accounts only for first-time, full-time students, and therefore doesn’t include students who have transferred, part-timers and associate degree students.

Instead, ‘colleges should do all they can to equip students to thrive in a world full of words and ideas that they cannot control, ‘ they write. And, if you’re not willing to go all-out and go for a career that requires many additional years of schooling, and a very hefty loan to pay for it (doctors, lawyers, etc.), then it may not be worth it to pursue a degree.

Criticism starts with the fact that the data apply only to students who receive federal financial aid.

The warnings come as President Barack Obama has declared that liberal college students should not be “coddled” nor “protected from different points of view” on the grounds that they are “sensitive”. With increased media attention on the issue and borrowers of student loans for for-profit colleges looking for ways to alleviate their debt burden, scammers may take advantage, said a member of the Debt Collective, Luke Herrine.

Obama first announced the idea in 2013, saying he thought the College Scorecard would be revolutionary by evaluating schools based on how much graduates earned after attending and how many financially unstable students applied.

The difficulty some students face in paying off that debt has been compounded by the ups and downs of the economy, low wages and modest job growth. A good rule of thumb, Kantrowitz said, is that students borrow no more for their education than the salary they expect to make upon graduating.

Better information about the paths students take to certificates and degrees will help them better navigate those paths, while helping institutions ease those pathways for students. “The rankings beyond a certain level were not that helpful for most kids”.

The University of North Georgia has an enrollment of 14,502 students across its many campuses. And we know that some of that debt is causing young adults to delay plans for things like buying homes and starting families.

But the reason why we’re seeing this happen actually makes a lot of sense, and it’s pretty simple: students who take out bigger loans typically go on to become higher earners. While data are becoming available on which students are experiencing the most trouble because of loan debt, and which institutions have large numbers of graduates or dropouts who are struggling to pay their debt back, this information is not yet easily accessible to students.

How do today’s students fare in the workforce?

For individuals, what all of this means is that we’re approaching a sort of crossroads when it comes to higher education.

We don’t know enough about how many recent graduates are employed and how much they are earning because we don’t report that information by field of study and for all students.

The new College Scorecard allows students to compare institutions based on a range of student data collected by the Departments of Education, Treasury and the General Service Administration. “University of Phoenix College of Education is proud to provide educational opportunities like the Teacher Appreciation Scholarship program to attract, retain and extend leadership opportunities to current and aspiring educators”. Despite some pushback from the Administration, it looks as though Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan has begun to show some support for the 529 legislation giving Republican lawmakers hope for a number of other education-related tax proposals.