Earlier this week, the National Center for Education Statistics announced technical changes in the measure of student loan amounts for the 2007-08 NPSAS - the survey conducted every four-years on student financial aid. I won't get into technical details (you can find them here), but the end result limits the ability to compare the most recent data from 2007-08 to prior years of data using the publicly available DAS system.
These changes impact the data presented in Drowning in Debt, the CYCT published by ES last Thursday in which we compare student loan data from the 5 most recent NPSAS surveys, from 1992-93 to 2007-08. NCES has already revised the data for 2003-04 and will finish updating the 1999-2000 and 1995-96 data sets by October 2009. Once NCES finishes revising the publicly available data sets so that they can be compared with each other, ES will re-publish adjusted charts.
Despite this change, the primary conclusion of our report - that student debt is rising - remains unchanged. The revisions to the 2003-04 data reduce the average total loan amount presented in Chart 2 of our report by an average of $600. This means that the increase from 2003-04 to 2007-08 was even steeper than we originally presented.
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