A nationwide study that reported a substantial decrease in the state of Iowa’s rankings in student debt turned out to be an oversight due to missing data from Iowa State.

The Project on Student Debt, an organization that identifies and reports average student debt trends across the country, omitted the 2006 average of ISU student debt from its studies. The project gathers its information from Peterson’s, a college-planning Web site similar to College Board.

Roberta Johnson, director of financial aid, said the information was submitted to Peterson’s, so she doesn’t know why it wasn’t reported.

“For some reason unbeknownst to me, the [Peterson’s] data wasn’t updated, so when the Project on Student Debt went to analyze, they noticed numbers had not changed and elected to eliminate Iowa State from the study,” Johnson said.

She said she is in the process of tracking down what happened with the information she sent and why it was not reported.

According to the Project on Student Debt Web site, the average student debt in Iowa for 2006 graduates was $22,926. As a result, Iowa dropped in the rankings from the second worst in the nation in 2005 presently to the sixth worst.

The average student debt for 2006 ISU graduates was $32,130, Johnson said. This number is based on an average of the 69 percent of students that had debt. This number is a $4,806 increase in average student debt, in relation to only a 1 percent increase in the amount of students in debt.

An unofficial recalculation conducted by Matthew Reed, policy analyst and primary writer and researcher for the report, concluded that had these numbers been part of the study, Iowa’s average student debt would have climbed to $25,406, placing Iowa second only to Washington, D.C., for highest average student debt in the nation. The District’s average student debt for 2006 was $27,757. This recalculation assumes that no data other than that of Iowa State’s has been altered.

Robert Shireman, executive director of the Project on Student Debt, said the study is conducted and published in order to raise awareness at colleges and universities of their students’ financial situations.

“This way, they can look at the numbers and know that they have high levels,” Shireman said. “It should prompt school officials to think about ways to reduce those levels.”