How Is It Possible That the Trustees at Cooper Union Have Not Resigned in Shame?
Eric Schneiderman is looking into the mess at Cooper Union. Let’s hope the outcome is a return to Cooper’s vision of free tuition.
Read more...Category Archives: Student loans
Department of Education Sides Against Students to Feather Its Own Bed in For-Profit Corinthian Colleges Debacle
How the Department of Education abused students while earning fees in the denouement of for-profit serial fraudster Corinthian Colleges.
Read more...Rolling Jubilee: A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing?
Yves here. As much as we we’ve been vocal supporters of many of the initiatives of the Occupy Wall Street movement, such as the excellent work of Occupy the SEC, the impressive relief efforts of Occupy Sandy, the success of local Occupy Homes groups in combatting foreclosures, the many projects of the Alternative Banking Group (including both a book explaining the crisis and its 52 Shades of Greed card deck, and last but not least, Strike Debt’s Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual.
However, Rolling Jubilee is a notable exception.
Read more...Obama Administration Again Sides With Abusive Loan Servicers, This Time on Student Loans
A corrosive development is the ease with which lenders steal extract income which is not properly theirs from borrowers through what is at best incompetence and in far too many cases is fraud. This pattern has repeats itself again and again: in mortgage servicing, with debt collection, and more and more with student loan servicing.
For-Profit Colleges as Factories of Debt
Yves here. The American higher education system has been sucking more and more of the economic life out of the children that supposedly represent our best and brightest, the ones with intelligence and self-disipline to do well enough to be accepted at college.
But even though the press has given some attention to how young adults, and sometimes their hapless parent/grandparent co-signers, can wind up carrying huge millstones of debt, there’s been comparatively less focus on the for-profit segment of the market. While their students constitute only 13% of the total college population, they account for 31% of student loans. Why such a disproportionately high debt load? As this post explains, the for-profit colleges are master predators, seeking out vulnerable targets like single mothers who will do what they think it takes to set themselves up to land a middle class job. This is the new American lower-class version of P.T. Barnum’s “a sucker is born every minute.” These social aspirants are easy to exploit because they haven’t gotten the memo that the American Dream is dead.
Read more...Why Wall Street and Consulting Firms Win at the Elite College Brain Drain Game
The question of why graduates of prestigious undergraduate schools still wind up, in disproportionate numbers, at places like Goldman and McKinsey may seem so obvious as to be unworthy of notice. Yet perversely, the students aren’t keen about these jobs despite having competed fiercely to land them.
Read more...Financial Predators Move On From Foreclosure Rescue, Enter Student Debt, Military Lending Spaces
At one level, a crackdown on foreclosure rescue scams and not the overarching mortgage and foreclosure fraud is like letting the arsonist who set fire to the house go while busting the guy who took five bucks off the dresser before the house started to burn. Nevertheless, these scams do represent some of the worst elements of our society, featuring the kind of people who see suffering and vulnerability and think about dollar signs. One of my first entrees into this world of foreclosure nightmares was through a friend who had fallen behind on his payments, and then paid somebody up-front money to help him secure a loan modification. That person did nothing to help and then skipped town with the cash.
So it’s good to see CFPB finally take a crack at this, in conjunction with the Federal Trade Commission and 15 states.
Read more...Student Loan Servicer Corruption Rewarded, Covered For in New Round of Obama Executive Actions
It is student loan week in the Democratic Party. Elizabeth Warren’s bill to refinance prior loans to the current 3.86% rate (including private loans owned by the likes of Sallie Mae), gets a vote on Wednesday. Yesterday, the President endorsed that bill, and threw in his own executive memorandum to, as the White House puts it, “make student loans more affordable.” Today, Obama will show up on Tumblr to further make the sale.
Read more...More Polite Handwringing About Student Debt Mess
The absence of serious discussion of an only-worsening student debt problem is troubling.
Read more...Undoing the Damage in Chile
Yves here. America hates taking lessons from other countries, but Chile looks about to embark on tackling a student debt/overpriced educational system mess that makes ours pale by comparison. So it will be instructive to see how this reform effort takes shape.
Read more...Wolf Richter: The Young Subprime Debt-Slave Generation
Yves here. It’s obvious that student debt is a train wreck. Yet the severity of this problem is barely acknowledged as a problem among policy classes. Is that because the looting must continue? But even if so, why do colleges and universities have such privileged status?
Read more...The Student DebtCropper System: Even the Destitute Hounded by Debt Collectors
As most people who have passing familiarity with student debt in the US know, it’s a millstone that is brutally difficult to remove. But it turns out that even the limited ways out are often not available in practice thanks to the hyper-aggressive conduct of a key government contractor.
Read more...Student Debt is Crushing the Economic Future of the Young
If a bad job market wasn’t damaging enough, the cost of paying off student loans does much more harm to the long-term prospects of young people than is commonly realized.
Read more...The Rise of an American Debtcropper System for the Young
Readers have often been using the term “neofeudalism” to describe the outlines of the new economic order, in which the uber wealthy and a thin cadre of their advisors, managers, and other elite professionals do well, with a network of less lofty managers helping oversee and orchestrate the provision of services to the broad base of the public, and they struggle to eke out a meager existence.
Debt appears to be the “one ring that rules them all” of this emerging order.
Read more...David Dayen: Student Loan Servicers, Like Mortgage Servicers, Failing to Inform Borrowers of Cheaper Payment Modifications
By David Dayen, a lapsed blogger, now a freelance writer based in Los Angeles, CA. Follow him on Twitter @ddayen We’re well beyond the Presidential “Message: I care about the middle class” tour, but among his priorities at one whistle-stop was a plan for reining in the cost of higher education. The idea for a […]
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