Washington, D.C. — The New America Foundation's Federal Education Budget Project announced Monday an update to its higher education funding database, available at www.edbudgetproject.org. The update includes the newest two- and three-year student loan cohort default rate data released last week by the U.S. Department of Education for virtually all of the nation’s higher education institutions.

The FEBP site allows users to view the new default rate data, which the Department of Education uses to identify schools that are ineligible for federal financial aid, by individual institution in tandem with many other data points. These include the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants, private student loan borrowing rates, graduation and retention rates, annual tuition and fees, and many others. Additionally, users can conduct custom comparisons of similar institutions, and all data are fully downloadable.

Cohort default rates for federal student loans show the percentage of a school's borrowers who enter repayment on their loans in a given year and default within either two or three years. Historically, the Department of Education has measured schools against the two-year cohort default rate, but is scheduled to begin using the three-year rate in 2014; the recently released three-year default rates represent the first official data for that measure. Currently, schools with two-year cohort default rates above 25 percent for each of the past three years, or over 40 percent for a single year, stand to lose eligibility for federal student loan and grant programs.

The FEBP database also includes student loan default rates from past years (as early as 2006) by institution, as well as a wealth of demographic, cost, outcome, and financial aid participation data at the state- and school-levels. FEBP is the only centralized source of these data available to the public, the media, and education policymakers

To view the data, click here.