A college degree is supposed to open doors, but for many Dallas-Fort Worth borrowers, the first major bill after school is proving difficult to keep up with. New federal data show nearly 21% of borrowers tied to D-FW schools were at least 90 days behind on payments.
The latest breakdown from The Dallas Morning News covers borrowers who entered repayment between January 2020 and May 2025. It is a nonpayment measure, not a count of every graduate with debt, and it tracks borrowers whose loans were more than 90 days delinquent.
The available local data are grouped by county and school type rather than presented as a simple one-campus leaderboard. In Dallas County, nonprofit schools had the highest nonpayment rate at about 26%, while public and for-profit schools each came in around 20%.
Tarrant County showed a sharper split: for-profit schools had a nonpayment rate of nearly 40%, compared with about 16% for public schools and 13% for nonprofit schools. The Dallas-Fort Worth numbers are part of a broader Texas problem, with roughly 276,000 borrowers in the statewide repayment cohort at least three months late.
The Dallas Morning News also reported that the number of Texans in federal student-loan default nearly doubled between September 2025 and March 2026, reaching about 878,000 borrowers with $19.7 billion in loans. That means the local figures are landing as missed payments move from a personal budget problem into a much larger statewide debt trend.
Why For-Profit Schools Stand Out
Nationally, the pattern is similar. The Associated Press reported that 33% of borrowers who attended for-profit schools were at least 90 days behind, more than twice the rate for borrowers from public schools.
Federal Student Aid said the newest institutional data are meant to give schools a more current view of repayment trouble while pandemic-era changes continue to distort older default-rate measurements. The agency said roughly 2,000 institutions nationwide had nonpayment rates of at least 25% in the latest update.
Experts have pointed to several overlapping reasons for the surge, including the long payment pause, confusion over changing repayment programs and the end of temporary protections that kept delinquent loans from entering default. William Chittenden of SMU’s Cox School of Business told KERA that many borrowers effectively received a fresh start during the pause before missed payments began counting again.
When Late Payments Become A Bigger Problem
Being 90 days late is not the same as being in default, but it can still cause immediate damage. According to Federal Student Aid, servicers can report loans that are at least 90 days delinquent to credit bureaus, while federal loans generally enter default after about 270 days without payment.
Default can lead to damaged credit, loss of access to additional federal aid, and collection actions such as withholding tax refunds or garnishing wages. The federal government has delayed some involuntary collections, but borrowers already behind are facing a repayment system that is changing again.
These figures also measure something different from the campus-by-campus borrowing rates examined in Hoodline. A school can have a relatively small share of graduates who borrow and still see repayment trouble among the borrowers it does have, which is why the new D-FW data deserve a closer look.
