Institutional debts, or debts that students owe directly to schools, stem from all sorts of student activity: nonpayment of parking tickets, library fees, or tuition. Although historically overlooked, there is growing understanding that these institutional debts can pose as much a barrier to student success and employment opportunities as traditional student loan debt, and that too often schools engage in harmful and abusive collection practices. The few existing studies show that students of color and low-income students owe a disproportionate amount of this debt and are therefore harmed the most.
The Student Borrower Protection Center (SBPC) submitted Maryland Public Information Act requests to 12 different public higher education institutions in the state of Maryland seeking information about the debt that current and former students owe to their schools. Only five out of the 12 institutions provided any data, and even of those that did, the data received was incomplete.
Read the report: Maryland Institutional Debt Public Records Analysis