The four-year pause on student loan payments has left behind an alarming fallout: Millions of student borrowers, having disengaged from the student loan system, are not making payments on their debts. Now, the Education Department is asking for help from colleges to get borrowers paying their loans again.

On Monday, the Department issued a Dear Colleague Letter to thousands of colleges and universities that depend on federal student loans. “Maintaining the integrity of the [student loan] programs has always been a shared responsibility among student borrowers, the Department, and participating institutions,” the letter reads.

Colleges ought to pay attention. While the consequences of student loan nonpayment fall mostly on borrowers and taxpayers, some institutions could feel the heat if enough borrowers who attended don’t pay.

The Education Department’s letter asked colleges to remind their former students of their obligations to repay federal student loans. It also requested that colleges tell borrowers to visit the Department’s student aid dashboard to educate themselves about repayment options and ensure their loans are in good standing. Schools are encouraged to “focus their initial outreach on students who are delinquent on one or more of their loans in order to prevent defaults.” Such outreach should be done by June 30.

The return to student loan repayment is partially a problem of awareness. After the government suspended student loan payments for years following the COVID-19 pandemic, many borrowers simply don’t know that payments are due again. Millions of borrowers who left school during the pause have never made a payment at all. Loan servicers have lost touch with borrowers who have changed addresses or contact information. Colleges may be able to communicate with borrowers whom the government and servicers cannot reach.

They should hurry. The latest data on student loan repayment from the Education Department reveal a dire situation. Among 35 million borrowers who were not enrolled in school at the end of March, just 12 million (35 percent) were making their loan payments on time every month. That is down from 56 percent in December 2019, right before the pause.

And yet, things could get worse: seven million borrowers are delinquent on their debts. If these borrowers continue not to pay, they could eventually default on their loans and be subject to collections. Those who haven’t made a payment on their loans since the pause effectively ended in October will start entering default this summer. The window to help borrowers avoid the worst consequences of nonpayment is closing.

Another 10 million borrowers are in a temporary forbearance, which will expire when federal courts rule on the fate of a challenged Biden-era loan repayment plan. Those borrowers will then need to reenter repayment—and without proper guidance and support, they could eventually default as well.

Everyone involved should want to avoid this looming tidal wave of student loan defaults. Borrowers who default see their wages garnished and their tax refunds seized, in addition to a black mark on their credit records. Taxpayers also lose out: the government typically recovers just 65 to 75 percent of defaulted student loan balances.

But if student loan defaults go high enough, colleges could also face serious consequences.

According to federal law, when a high proportion of former students default on their loans within three years of entering repayment, their school could lose access to Pell Grants and student loans going forward. For many schools reliant on federal aid, triggering this provision could be a death sentence.

Schools can lose aid when their students’ default rate exceeds 30 percent for three consecutive years or 40 percent in just one year. No schools have lost aid since 2019, because the student loan payment pause prevented defaults. But even before that, only a handful of schools were penalized, as the default-rate thresholds proved too high to be effective.

With delinquency rates much higher than they were pre-pandemic, however, a wave of defaults is looming which could send many colleges into the danger zone. Institutions therefore have a direct stake in the success of the return to student loan repayment.

Preventing defaults must be an all-hands-on-deck effort. The Trump administration has announced many positive steps to that end: a communications campaign, direct outreach to borrowers, and clearing the backlog of applications for Income-Driven Repayment. But colleges—which rake in tens of billions of dollars annually from student loans—have a responsibility too. It’s time for schools to uphold their obligations by reminding their alumni that the student loan payment pause is over.