Month: January 2017

The US government, either on purpose or due to honest miscalculation, has been fabricating student loan default data, making it appear far lower than it was. The Education Department released a memo saying that it had overstated student loan repayment rates at most colleges and trade schools and provided updated numbers. A spokeswoman for the Education Department said that the problem resulted from a “technical programming error.” How bad was the data fabrication? When The Wall Street Journal analyzed the new numbers, the data revealed that the Department previously had inflated the repayment rates for 99.8% of all colleges and trade schools in the country. In other words, virtually every single number was made to appear better than it was.