What the Federal Reserve's November Consumer Credit Report says about student loans

Revisions to Student Loan and Total Debt Balances
From the inception of the FRBNY Consumer Credit Panel, we have frequently compared the aggregate balances reported on our sample of consumer credit reports to other publicly available sources of data. For most categories of consumer debt, our aggregate figures are close to other public estimates and/or we are able to understand the differences we observe. However, we came to realize that our aggregate reported student loan balance was at the low end of the substantial range of publicly available sources.3 After several months of discussions with our vendor, we have now come to understand the source of this difference.
Our new data reflect changes to our vendor’s method of identifying outstanding student loans in 2011Q2 and 2011Q3. In particular, the new data for student loan balances – and total debt outstanding – incorporate additional student loan accounts that had previously been excluded.4
The revisions to the data are fairly substantial: as of our August report, 2011Q2 student loan balances were reported at $550 billion. We now estimate that student loans outstanding in that quarter (2011Q2) amounted to $845 billion, $290 billion or 53.7% higher than we reported earlier. These previously excluded loans were also missing from the total debt outstanding; as a result, our estimate of total debt outstanding in 2011Q2 is also revised upward by $290 billion (2.5%).
For now, we only have data using the revised methodology for the two most recent quarters – 2011Q2 and 2011Q3. As noted above, the charts and data for the 2011Q3 Quarterly Report have been adjusted and annotated to reflect this fact. We are continuing to work with our vendor to make revisions to earlier data (1999Q1-2011Q1) and will report revised data when we have them.

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