On Friday, the U.S. Department of Education released new data on student-loan repayment that included figures on loan delinquencies—potentially good news for those interested in how well students are faring when it comes to paying back their loans.
The release precipitated an article the following Monday in The Huffington Post by Shahien Nasiripour titled, "Half Of Federal Student Loan Borrowers Not Paying On Time." In his article, Mr. Nasiripour broke down the data and stated, as the headline promised, that "less than half of borrowers with the most common type of federal student loan are repaying their debt on time." Included in that analysis, as Mr. Nasiripour himself pointed out later, were borrowers who had deferments because they were attending graduate school or serving in the military, or for other reasons not necessarily related to economic hardship.
That stirred debate on Twitter and among policy wonks about how to best interpret the data and what Mr. Nasiripour had written—prompting him to join the Twitter conversation and explain his methodology for his article.
Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/blogs/data/2014/08/14/what-the-data-dont-say-could-be/