Educate Tennessee

It’s not often you see “We Told You So” in the headline of a press release, but the National Black Chamber of Commerce (NBCC) couldn’t resist.

The subject of their righteous indignation is yet another government blunder. The U.S. Department of Education has finally gotten around to admitting that it’s claim that disparities related to racial/ethnic differences among college students are only responsible for 1% of the difference in student loan defaults between career college students and other college students is totally bogus.

In their own words: “we used the wrong data to calculate the percent of total variance in institutions’ repayment rates that may be explained by race/ethnicity. Our intent was to use the data that included all minority students per institution. However, we mistakenly used the data for a subset of minority students per institution.”

And this wasn’t a tiny math error. The Department of Education now admits the true number is 20 times what it originally reported. Remember, these are the numbers the Department used to justify its Gainful Employment rule, which the NBCC warned would severely hurt minority students and block them from access to college.

So you can see why an I told you so was in order.

(And, of course, this isn’t the first government agency caught red-handed with a bogus report and forced to revise its “facts” months later.)