"The first thing to say is that the New York Fed figures I published for total student loans are not accurate — they understate the truth of the matter ... And yes, the new numbers will show that student-loan debt exceeds credit-card debt."
"And more generally, it’s probably suboptimal that the best public data series for student-loan debt comes from a sample of credit reports from Equifax. Since the government owns the vast majority of student loans, why can’t it just publish accurate data for total federal student loans outstanding? That would certainly be easier than having to piece such things together from dozens of disparate line items in the annual budget. I suspect, too, that the government also has pretty good data on private student loans, as well. But putting a data series together is a big undertaking: you have to find the data going back quite a ways, and then you have to commit to updating it on a regular basis. I suppose that no one really cares enough to have made that happen, ever — with the result that no one really knows for sure just how much America owes in student loans."
No comments:
Post a Comment