Now you can see, at an unprecedented level of detail, the financial burden that low-income students face at colleges in Maine and around the nation.
Based on numbers gathered by the Obama administration, the investigative newsroom ProPublica has created an interactive database called Debt By Degrees, which allows you to search for almost 7,000 schools.
How much federal loan debt do each school’s Pell Grant recipients — students from families most often making less than $30,000 per year — accrue compared with students from wealthier backgrounds? How many of them can pay off that debt? How much money do they go on to earn?
As you can tell from the data — and as studies have shown — even a small amount of debt can be a big burden on low-income students. And rarely do federal loans cover the full expense of college.
Here are some key takeaways from the dataset:
University of Maine
The University of Maine, the state’s only research university, accepts a fair number of students who receive Pell Grants — about 37 percent. But those lower-income students are also accumulating a fair amount of debt. The median federal debt of Pell grantees is $21,500, ranking UMaine 142nd out of 171 similar schools. (It was $27,000 for all grads.)
Three years after graduation, about 15 percent of UMaine alumni who received Pell Grants have been unable to pay off any of the principal on their federal student loans.
Community colleges
Maine’s community colleges are more likely to enroll low-income students. Though those students can get good federal aid — tuition at Washington County Community College in Calais, for example, costs low-income students $4,434 per year on average — they tend to have a hard time paying back what debt they do accrue.
About 46 percent of Pell Grant recipients in Calais cannot make payments on the principal of their federal loans three years after they graduate. Nearly half earn what they would have likely made with just a high school diploma, 10 years after entering school.
Kaplan University in South Portland, which was compared against other private for-profit, four-year community colleges, sees nonpayment rates of more than 68 percent for low-income students.
Meanwhile, Beal College in Bangor, a private for-profit, two-year community college, accepts a large number of low-income students — 77 percent — but many can’t make significant progress toward paying off their loans after they graduate. About 56 percent can’t pay off any of their loan principal after three years.
What’s more, about half of Beal’s graduates don’t earn more than the average wage made by someone with only a high school diploma. Forty-nine percent of students who receive federal aid end up earning, on average, $25,000 or less per year, 10 years after they first enroll.
Bachelor’s degrees colleges
Colby, Bates and Bowdoin colleges don’t accept many low-income students, but the students they do accept get a substantial amount of aid. Low-income students at Bates get 76 percent off the total cost of tuition per year; Bowdoin students get 92 percent off the total cost; and Colby students get 91 percent off on average.
Those low-income students are also paying off their loans once they graduate: Bates sees a nonpayment rate of just 2 percent within three years; it’s 8 percent at Bowdoin and 12 percent at Colby.
Check out your alma mater here.
