To: bart13 who wrote (129117 ) 1/27/2017 6:15:01 PM From: Pogeu Mahone Read Replies (1) | Respond to Oh for gosh sakes. A $1 reduction off the principal of your loan keeps you current.. Dept of education is illiterate. Oopsie! Department of Education cops to massive math error on student loans What a confidence builder, eh ? This looks more like a confidence game, though, in support of the Obama administration’s war on for-profit schools. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board blasts the Department of Education for waiting months to disclose that they had made a huge error on student-loan defaults, even while issuing regulations that hammered for-profit schools on the basis of that error:In early January the department disclosed that it had discovered a “coding error” that incorrectly computed College Scorecard repayment rates—that is, the percentage of borrowers who haven’t defaulted and have repaid at least one dollar of their loan principal. The department says the error “led to the undercounting of some borrowers who had not reduced their loan balances by at least one dollar.” Prior to this admission, the Department of Education had claimed that only a third of all student loans had never begun repayment — but that the rate soared to over half at for-profit schools. Based on that calculation, DoEd finalized a rule that required those schools to post a warning in all of their promotional materials to the effect that their students tended to be deadbeats. State-based and non-profit private colleges are exempted from those disclosures, based on the bad math performed by the DoEd.just bad math, as the WSJ’s editorial board points out:Marc Jerome, president of for-profit Monroe College in the Bronx, discovered the Scorecard rate inflation last August. In several emails to Education officials, he urged the department to hold off on finalizing the regulation. If the regulation were applied evenly, a large number of nonprofit and public institutions would fail to meet the standard. But then the justification for the department’s selective regulation of for-profits would vanish. Call it … bad math with a purpose . Had it just been a routine “coding error,” and without any malice, then Jerrome’s repeated entreaties pointing out the problem would have resulted in a correction and a new report. This looks more like a deliberate attempt to cook the books in order to blame student-loan defaults on poor career performance for those who matriculate from for-profit schools. Instead, we now know that long-term performance, as measured by student-loan defaults, looks about the same between the for-profit and not-for-profit education centers. That knowledge would have undercut the regulatory hostility toward the former for almost the entirety of the Obama administration, which is why the DoEd only revealed it on Barack Obama’s entry into retirement.
