More than 1 million students attend schools that the Department of Education is monitoring because of concerns about shaky finances or regulatory compliance, a new analysis suggests.

During the 2012-2013 academic year, 1.6 million students — or about 5% of college students in the country — went to schools currently under so-called heightened cash monitoring, according to a new study from the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank.

Heightened cash monitoring is a designation that means the Department of Education is paying closer attention to how the school spends its financial aid dollars.

The analysis offers some clarity around how many students may be attending a school at risk of shutting down. Federal financial aid is a major source of funding for colleges, and schools under heightened cash monitoring are held to more strict rules when collecting federal funds. Schools under the most severe level of monitoring, known as HCM2, have to send the department specific documents in order to collect their federal aid funds.

The Department of Education can put schools under heightened cash monitoring for issues as small as late or missing audits or as serious as severe findings uncovered during by the DOE during a review of the school. The DOE released a list of the colleges under heightened cash monitoring for the first time last month after media pressure to give students and taxpayers a better picture of whether colleges were being good stewards of federal aid dollars.

“Heightened Cash Monitoring is not necessarily a red flag to students and taxpayers, but it can serve as a caution light,” Ted Mitchell, the undersecretary for the DOE, wrote in a blog post when the agency published the list.

Elizabeth Baylor, the author of the CAP report and the associate director for postsecondary education at the think tank, analyzed enrollment data from the Department of Education to come up with her findings. Although the data are from 2012-2013 (the most recent year available) and the DOE’s list of schools under heightened cash monitoring is current as of March 2015, Baylor said the analysis offers an accurate window into how many students are at effected schools because she doesn’t expect enrollment has changed that much at any given school.

“We’re delighted that the Department of Education put out this information, I just thought there was kind of a hole,” Baylor said. “We were missing the student element to this story and making this information transparent is all about helping students improve their choices.”

About 65% of the students attending a school on heightened cash monitoring attended a for-profit institution, according to the CAP analysis.

CAP

Corinthian Colleges, the for-profit education company in the process of shutting down, was placed on heightened cash monitoring in June. The DOE also delayed aid payments to the company by 21 days, pushing Corinthian into a cash crunch. Corinthian agreed to shut down or sell all of its campuses in July amid allegations the school falsified graduation and job placement rates.

On Tuesday, the Department announced it would fine Heald College, which is owned by Corinthian, nearly $30 million for exaggerating graduates’ job prospects.