Roughly 70% of America’s bright-eyed and bushy-tailed high school seniors will go on to binge drink study at a 4-year college, but, to our complete shock, less than two-thirds of them will manage to graduate with a degree. Even worse, 30% of the students will drop-out after just one year on campus.

Not surprisingly, a survey conducted recently by LendEDU found that college dropouts still manage to rack up an average of nearly $14,000 worth of student debt during their brief college careers and a staggering number of them go on to default on that debt in very short order.

LendEDU polled 1,000 respondents that had dropped-out of a four-year higher education institution and also held some amount of student loan debt. We wanted to find out how much student loan debt they owed when the walked away from college.

Respondents were given the ability to enter in an exact dollar amount when asked how much student loan debt they held when they made the choice to drop-out of school. After averaging together all 1,000 responses, we found that when the average college dropout finally gave up on college, they owed $13,929.65 in student loan debt.

LendEDU pegs the average student loan debt per graduated borrower figure at $27,975, so the aforementioned debt per dropout amount makes good sense. Under the assumption that most dropouts leave campus by the end of their second year, the debt per dropout figure is nearly half of the four-year debt per borrower figure of $27,975. That figure cut in half would equal $13,987.50, a tick above our debt per dropout figure of $13,929.65.

Nearly half of college dropouts interviewed by LendEDUadmitted they’re not currently making payments.

Even worse, just over 35% of the students interviewed said they hadn’t made a single payment toward their student loans since dropping out of college…

…all of which resulted in nearly 50% of respondents saying they’re currently in default on their student loans.