ALBANY — Some student loan providers have been setting rates based on the schools borrowers attend, a practice New York’s attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, likens to “redlining” in the home mortgage market.

Mr. Cuomo said his office’s investigation of the $85 billion industry found that a “significant number” of lenders rank colleges and universities on the loan default rates of their students and set interest rates higher for schools with poor records, according to a letter he sent Monday to the chairmen of two congressional committees.

“In other words, just as lenders in the mortgage industry once made judgments about credit lending in entire neighborhoods as a whole, so too are lenders making generalized judgments about student and parent credit risk based on a student’s ‘school neighborhood,'” Mr. Cuomo told Senator Dodd of Connecticut and Rep. George Miller, a Democrat from California.

One “large lender” offers students at schools that have default rates up to 3% the best interest rates — from 8 to 9.25% — while institutions with default rates between 5 and 10% are hit with interest rates from 11 to 14%, Mr. Cuomo said.

So students with “excellent” personal credit histories are quoted an 8% rate if they’re going to Duke University and 11% if they attend the University of Phoenix, in one of Mr. Cuomo’s examples. If their credit is less than “stellar,” Duke students get a rate no worse than 9.25%, while Phoenix students would see rates as high as 14%. Mr. Cuomo said the “disparities remain even if parents co-sign the loan.”

While annual tuition and expenses at Duke tops $46,000, Phoenix — which heavily promotes its online courses — generally costs “much less than” $20,000.