EDITORIAL: Analysis reveals far more students behind on their loans that originally reported

The cost of college continues to rise, in part because of all the “free” federal money floating through the system. And now we learn that the looming student debt implosion will likely cost taxpayers far more than previously expected.

In 2015, the U.S. Department of Education released its College Scorecard, as well as a data attachment to its Financial Aid Shopping sheet. But last week, the Wall Street Journal reported, the department released a memo saying that both documents overstated student loan repayment rates at most colleges and trade schools. Department officials chalked up the mistake to a programming glitch.

“After discovering the coding error, the department worked to get accurate, refreshed data out as soon as possible, not waiting until the next annual Scorecard update to do so,” wrote Lynn Mahaffie, a department official.

According to a Journal analysis of the new numbers, the department previously had inflated the repayment rates for students at an amazing 99.8 percent of the nation’s colleges and trade schools. The review found that “at more than 1,000 colleges and trade schools, or about a quarter of the total, at least half the students had defaulted or failed to pay down at least $1 on their debt within seven years.”

That’s far higher than originally reported.

The erroneous rates in the 2015 report were intended to be part of the Obama administration’s aborted attempt to rate colleges and tie federal funding to those ratings. That report originally pegged at 347 the number of schools at which more than half of students had defaulted or failed to make payments scheduled to begin in 2006 or 2007.

That number increased to 477 when the department last September released data about students who should’ve begun paying back their loans in 2007 and 2008. The revised, numbers, now bump the figure all the way up to 1,029.

No college saw its repayment rate improve under the revision, with some schools seeing their seven-year repayment rates drop by as much as 29 percent.

Outstanding student debt now exceeds $1.2 billion despite the Obama administration’s push to essentially nationalize the college loan market. That move was sold by progressives such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., as a means of saving money and protecting students from evil and greedy Wall Street bankers.

Instead, the Department of Education has essentially been making up numbers that obscure the extent to which American taxpayers will eventually be forced to eat the tab for those who can’t or won’t meet their obligations.

But don’t worry. “Free” college is just around the corner if Democrats get their wish.