Student loan giant Sallie Mae has released a new study, How America Pays for College 2009, that misrepresents the state of college lending today.

Sallie Mae is facing potentially crippling losses of revenue under the government’s planned shift to direct lending for college students. Right now, the company manages $188 billion dollars a year in college loans, revenue that would be threatened if direct lending becomes a reality. (The government anticipates that student loan reform would save $87 billion over ten years.)

In its new report, Sallie Mae trumpets the results of a survey it commissioned that found that “58 percent of families invested in higher education last year without borrowing.” It uses this finding to claim that “American families are making the investment in higher education the smart way – by pursuing grants and scholarships more frequently than borrowing.”

But Sallie Mae’s figures are for a single year, not the length of an undergraduate career, and they’re based on survey results, not hard data. As it turns out — and as we reported less than two weeks ago — a new study by the College Board has just been released that uses real numbers and a multi-year perspective, and it found that 59% of college students borrowed, almost half again as many as Sallie Mae suggests.