Dive Brief:

• The three-year default rate on federal student loans dropped to 13.7% last year, down from 14.7% one year earlier.
• The U.S. Department of Education data doesn’t clarify whether the department’s income-based repayment plans or its publicity campaigns about repayment options have made a difference, Bloomberg reports.
• About 44% of the student loan defaulters were students at for-profit colleges.

Dive Insight:

The drop in defaults is probably due to a combination of the income-based payment plans, the economy improving, for-profit colleges manipulating their default numbers, and schools trying to prevent defaults, a source told Bloomberg.

For the raw numbers, more than 4.7 million student loan borrowers started to repay in the three years ending Sept. 30, 2013, and 650,000 of them defaulted — going 270 days without a payment. For the three years ending Sept. 30, 2012, 4.1 million borrowers started repayments, and more than 600,000 of them defaulted. The default rates were 12.9% for public colleges, down from 13%; 7.2% for private nonprofit schools, down from 8.2%; and 19.1% for for-profit colleges, down from 21.8%.