African-American students who took out federal student loans owed more on those loans 12 years after entering college than they originally borrowed, including those who earned a bachelor’s degree, according an analysis of new data from the U.S. Department of Education.

“I expected we would see bad results for dropouts,” says Ben Miller, the senior director for postsecondary education at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, who analyzed the federal data. “What shocked me more than anything was seeing how even completing a bachelor’s degree still produced really disparate outcomes.”

The new data comes from a report released earlier this month by the department’s National Center for Education Statistics, which focuses on two groups of borrowers – those who entered postsecondary education in the 1995-96 academic year and those who entered in the 2003-04 academic year.

The report presents estimates of both groups’ borrowing, repayment and default statuses as of June 30, 2015, some 20 years after the first group and 12 years after the second group began their postsecondary education. Unlike most federal higher education data collected, the new set allows researchers to break down the information by race or ethnic background.

“The narrative I had in my head when I started running these numbers is that the problems we have are related to completion,” he continues. “But what these data show is that even those who have achieved at the highest outcome from undergrad ed, still have a substantial problem. That speaks to how far we have to go in addressing equity issues with student loans.”

At play are an array of issues that have compounded the problem over decades – things like admissions practices that can steer African-American students to schools with fewer resources, which in turn could mean less financial aid or fewer wraparound services aimed at helping students graduate. And financial aid requirements, like minimum GPAs, which Miller says may be disproportionately resulting in African-American students losing their aid and forcing them to borrow more.

Miller, who on Monday published his data analysis, “New Federal Data Show a Student Loan Crisis for African American Borrowers,” found that African-American borrowers who began college in the 2003-04 academic year owed 113 percent of what they originally borrowed after 12 years, a figure that’s increased over the years. African-American students who began college in the 1995-96 year, for example, owed 101 percent after 12 years.

Notably, he found, borrowers who earned degrees were not insulated from those outcomes.

The analysis also found that African-American students were more likely to borrow than their peers: 78 percent of black students took out federal loans for undergraduate education within 12 years of entering, compared to 57 percent of white students.

Miller wasn’t the only one to uncover negative outcomes for African-American borrowers.

As first reported by Inside Higher Ed, Robert Kelchen, an assistant professor at Seton Hall University, also ran the data and found that nearly half, or 49 percent, of all African-American borrowers in the 2003-04 group defaulted on at least one loan within 12 years – a rate that was more than twice that of white students and more than four times the rate of Asian students.

“The differentials are still present across sector, with more than one-third of black students defaulting across all sectors while a relatively small percentage of Asian students defaulted across all nonprofit sectors,” Kelchen wrote of his analysis, which, like Miller’s, also found significantly increased default rates for African-American borrowers at for-profit colleges.

What can be done to rectify the problem? Both Miller and Kelchen emphasize the importance of making more data on loan, debt and default available that can be sorted by race and ethnic background.

“Because of the very real and understandable concerns about red-lining, we tend to have a lot of hesitancy about talking about race and debt,” Miller says. “On the one hand, that’s good because if you don’t collect it and look at it it’s harder to engage in discriminatory practice. But when you don’t look at it or talk about it, you can allow massive problems to exacerbate.”

Policy solutions, however, are a little less clear.

“I actually don’t know how we solve this, which is why I think we have to start with at least getting a better handle on the problem,” Miller says. “We need to start looking at gaps in outcomes by race and institution. Is this a problem because it’s isolated in certain types of schools or certain states? Where is this a problem? Where is this not a problem?”

“We have a lot of things in higher ed that are not set up to have a disparate impact by race but may still result in them just because of how we construct things,” Miller adds.

Those include things like how institutions of higher education are funded, with both public and private dollars funneled to more elite and selective colleges and universities, at which African-American students are less likely to win admission.

Despite the sobering findings, most higher education policy experts agree that students who earn a degree are still much better off than those who don’t, although that’s less of a clear-cut argument when it comes to certificate programs.