DebtData relies on public data, official statistical releases, documented research datasets, and source files that allow the reported values to be traced back to their origin. The preferred source is the organization that collected, administered, or officially published the data.
Federal Student Aid and the U.S. Department of Education
Federal Student Aid is the primary source for federal student loan portfolio statistics. Its data can include outstanding balances, recipient counts, loan types, repayment plans, loan status, delinquency, default, debt-size bands, age groups, school type, and geographic information.
Federal portfolio data should not automatically be treated as a measure of all private and federal student debt combined. The population and program coverage stated by Federal Student Aid control how the figures are described on DebtData.
National Center for Education Statistics
The National Center for Education Statistics provides survey and administrative data used for questions involving students, graduates, institutions, financial aid, degree level, demographic characteristics, and education outcomes. NCES datasets are especially useful when a question cannot be answered by a current federal loan portfolio table alone.
Federal Reserve System
The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Reserve Banks publish consumer-credit, household-finance, and survey measures that can provide broader context for student debt. These series may use different coverage rules from Federal Student Aid and are kept separate when the populations do not match.
Other Federal and State Sources
Depending on the topic, DebtData may use data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Congressional Research Service, Government Accountability Office, state agencies, and other public institutions. These sources can provide population, inflation, income, labor-market, policy, or geographic context needed to interpret debt statistics.
Research Organizations
Established nonprofit research organizations, academic publications, and other documented research sources may be used when they provide a measure that is not available from an official administrative dataset. The scope and population of the research are retained in the description so that the findings are not generalized beyond what the source supports.
Secondary Publications
News sites, financial publishers, and other secondary sources can help identify a report or dataset, but DebtData does not use them as the final authority when the original source can be obtained. A statistic is traced back to the underlying agency, dataset, or research publication whenever practical.
Source Periods and Revisions
Many official data files are updated on quarterly, annual, or irregular schedules. Some agencies also revise previously published observations. DebtData records the period measured by the source and does not assume that the date a file was downloaded is the period represented by the data.
Source Quality Checks
Before a statistic is used, DebtData checks the value, unit, geography, population, period, dataset name, and whether the figure is official, estimated, provisional, rounded, modeled, or calculated. When those details cannot be established with reasonable confidence, the number is not used as a definitive statistic.