The Department of Education has arbitrarily changed its rules about sanctioning schools if they have too many students in default on their college loans. It is apparently responding to howls of pain from colleges with high rates of default, especially community colleges and historically black schools.

Inside Higher Ed put it this way today:

…officials said they identified which colleges were on the verge of losing their student aid, and then removed from their cohort borrowers who defaulted on one loan but had not defaulted on another loan. The non-defaulted loan, they said, had to have been in repayment, deferment or forbearance for at least 60 days.
The adjustment was also applied retroactively to colleges’ three-year default rates for the past two years.

The penalty for exceeding the 30 percent default figure for three years is a ban on enrolling students with federal loans—a punishment that would be lethal to many schools.

That default standard was passed by Congress in 2008. Now, a friendly administration has changed the rules.