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Student Loan Debacle,chump shafts YOUR kids.....

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Printed Date: March 28 2024 at 1:22am


Topic: Student Loan Debacle,chump shafts YOUR kids.....
Posted By: carbon20
Subject: Student Loan Debacle,chump shafts YOUR kids.....
Date Posted: December 12 2017 at 1:13pm

Last October, just about a week after  https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-brags-about-nonconsensually-groping-women-in-newly-uncovered-recording" rel="nofollow - the release  of the infamous Access Hollywood "pussy" tape, Donald Trump gave a  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/10/13/trump-just-laid-out-a-pretty-radical-student-debt-plan/?utm_term=.6b4d607427c5" rel="nofollow - surprising speech  in Columbus, Ohio.

While the entire Republican Party was  http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/the-fury-and-failure-of-donald-trump-w444943" rel="nofollow - running sideways away  from his cratering campaign, Trump was scrambling to find a way back in the race. One of his strategies – and I remember watching this on the trail – was to tack back to the populist themes he'd used to great effect in the Republican primaries.

In Columbus, with Hillary Clinton running away with the election, Trump unveiled what even The Washington Post described as a "pretty radical student debt plan." The basic idea was income-based repayment capped at 12.5 percent, then total loan forgiveness after 15 years of payments.

"Students should not be asked to pay more on the debt than they can afford," Trump said. "And the debt should not be an albatross around their necks for the rest of their lives."

Trump hasn't gone back on that proposal, not exactly, anyway. The 12.5 percent-times-15-years concept was indeed part of a plan he submitted this past summer, at least  https://studentloanhero.com/news/trump-student-loan-plan/" rel="nofollow - for undergraduates .

But that same plan proposed a wipeout of five other existing income-based repayment plans, and grad students would be pushed into a harsher program requiring payments for  https://www.studentloanplanner.com/trump-education-budget/" rel="nofollow - 30 years .

Moving forward, Trump and the Republican Party have all but buried the campaign-trail "fairly radical" plan under a series of other student-bashing decisions.

On Monday, Fortune reported that Department of Education head Betsy DeVos  http://fortune.com/2017/12/11/devos-student-debt-forgiveness/" rel="nofollow - is seeking to end  a program to cancel the debt of students defrauded by ripoff diploma-mill universities.

This came just as the inspector general of the Department of Education issued  https://ed.gov/about/offices/list/oig/auditreports/fy2018/i04r0003.pdf" rel="nofollow - a blistering report  showing that DeVos had already essentially stopped processing such claims under the existing program.

The IG report shows that the Trump administration has received 25,991 such claims since Inauguration Day, and approved exactly none of them.

None of this is a surprise. After all, Donald Trump himself ran one of the more notorious higher-education scams, settling a lawsuit for  https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/31/522199535/judge-approves-25-million-settlement-of-trump-university-lawsuit" rel="nofollow - $25 million  last year. And DeVos has spent much of her tenure  https://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/31/devos-trump-forprofit-college-education-242193" rel="nofollow - walking back  Obama-era initiatives to rein in diploma-mill scams.

The latest DeVos move comes in sync with a nasty piece of legislation introduced by House Republicans this month. Billed as a measure to "simplify" the student loan system, HR 4508, a.k.a. the  https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/4508/text" rel="nofollow - PROSPER Act ,  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/12/us/politics/house-republican-higher-education-bill-obama.html?_r=0" rel="nofollow - would repeal and prevent  the re-adoption of the "Borrower Defense" program that DeVos has already stalled.

"The student loan 'swamp' wrote HR 4508," says Alan Collinge of StudentLoanJustice.Org. "Killing the Borrower Defense Rules was high on their wish list. This bill is their Christmas tree."

The PROSPER Act also contains one of the all-time revolting instances of a fine-print legislative atrocity. Way down on page 250, in section 452 of the bill, you'll find this line:

"(C) In no event may the borrower recover amounts previously collected by the Secretary later than 3 years after the misconduct or breach of contract on behalf of the institution takes place that gives rise to the borrower to assert a defense to repayment of the loan."

In other words, under the Republican plan, there's no relief if the application comes three years after the "misconduct" – which is usually a promise of future employment or exposure to dummied-up job stats that you receive in the form of a slimy pitch in the admissions process.

But many students will spend two years (or more) in school before they realize they've been had. So a three-year statute of limitations is essentially a license to steal.

Another monstrosity buried in the bill is in section 422. Titled "LOAN REHABILITATION," the line simply says that loans may now be rehabilitated "two times" instead of once.

Rehabilitation is a practice complained about by many of the former students I spoke with for  http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-the-great-college-loan-swindle-w510880" rel="nofollow - a recent 
As Collinge explains, rehabilitation "is where a defaulted loan is recycled into a new, much larger loan, and the agents making this happen get a whopping commission of up to 16 percent."

Rehabilitation is usually the first step of borrowers falling into a cycle where they're eventually only paying interest and never touching the principal. The new Republican bill will allow borrowers to double down on such dilemmas.

The PROSPER Act would also exacerbate another major problem with the federal student lending system, by raising caps on borrowing.

Students who are dependent on their parents could increase their borrowing by $8,000 under the new plan. "Independent" students would be allowed to borrow $3,000 more, while graduate and medical school students would be allowed to borrow between $10,000-$12,000 more.

This sounds like it's a good thing – increased aid to students. But rising amounts of available credit would more or less instantly inflate tuition costs, making the gains for students questionable.

The combination of making college a near-mandatory prerequisite for all but the most menial work, combined with with a) continually rising levels of student credit and b) the impossibility of discharging the debt, has led to an explosion of tuition costs over the years. Tuition has been  http://college.usatoday.com/2017/06/09/private-college-tuition-is-rising-faster-than-inflation-again/" rel="nofollow - outpacing inflation  by nearly double the rate for some time.

Under the current system, each successive generation of students enters the already strained workforce saddled with more and more debt, and facing more competition.

The winners are the colleges and universities, who get to charge outlandish prices without having to be accountable to normal market forces.

This leads to a sort of Picture of Dorian Gray situation with unpaid student debt. Because the growing mountain of delinquent payments is obscured in the government guarantee, the catastrophe is hidden away in a kind of macroeconomic attic, mostly undetected by the general population.

https://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2017/12/05/student-loan-debt-the-bubble-goldman-thinks-you-should-buy/" rel="nofollow - Even Goldman Sachs described  the $1.3 trillion in outstanding student loan debt as a "bubble" in a research paper earlier this month. But, as the bank cheerily reminded readers, this particular bubble doesn't pose a systemic threat, because most of the debt is fully guaranteed by the U.S. government.

The bank noted that an astonishing 10 percent of all student borrowers are currently at least 90 days behind on their debt, compared to just 1.2 percent of mortgage holders. It's the highest delinquency rate among any form of consumer credit.

Hilariously, while Goldman was coolly describing this growing catastrophe, and saying it saw little reason to invest in most forms of student lending, it still recommended that refis of "super-prime" private graduate loans might be "worth a look."

Always a silver lining to every disaster!

In any case, all of this represents the ultimate perfect storm of bad incentives. Schools get to keep raising tuition, kids are still basically forced to go to college, and the trillion-dollar lump of pain waiting to be released onto the world sits mainly on the shoulders of the taxpayer, and/or ex-students struggling in a tighter workplace.

There is a bill that would fix all of this, HR 2366, the  https://katko.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/reps-katko-and-delaney-file-legislation-help-americans-struggling" rel="nofollow - Discharge Student Loans In Bankruptcy Act . Introduced by Maryland Democrat John Delaney and New York Republican John Katko, it would repeal the single line of federal code that makes it impossible to discharge student loans in bankruptcy, like any other form of debt.

Maybe this will get passed someday. But somehow, that feels too obvious – " https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0X0ZYbnHxA" rel="nofollow - No, that's just what they'll be expecting us to do !" as Congress might put it.

As a candidate, Donald Trump repeatedly took advantage of genuine frustrations among voters, over everything from high drug prices to exported jobs to predatory Goldman bankers to non-dischargeable student debt.

It's lost among the popular accounts of what happened in 2016, but he mined this territory quite a lot on the trail. This was particularly true in the heat of the primary race, and during his most desperate moments in his scandal-plagued October.

Then he got elected and surrounded himself with so many Goldman bankers that even that  https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/lloyd-blankfein-so-many-goldman-sachs-alums-trump-admin-inconvenience-n757076" rel="nofollow - even Lloyd Blankfein was embarrassed , nominated  https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/trump-picks-alex-azar-to-lead-the-health-and-human-services-department/2017/11/13/ad6a4e16-c408-11e7-84bc-5e285c7f4512_story.html?utm_term=.f7093c1ae999" rel="nofollow - an Eli Lilly executive  to run the Health and Human Services department, and put https://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/31/devos-trump-forprofit-college-education-242193" rel="nofollow -  for-profit education   https://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/30/julian-schmoke-jr-trump-education-department-college-enforcement-242176" rel="nofollow - creeps  in charge of the DOE, who are now working with congressional Republicans to ram through this nonsense.

All politicians tack populist pre-election, then cover their promises with bureaucratic sand once elected. Trump just does it more blatantly and offensively than the rest. The man is tacky even when it comes to political clichés.




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Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.🖖

Marcus Aurelius



Replies:
Posted By: carbon20
Date Posted: December 12 2017 at 1:14pm
Education inspector general calls on agency to process backlog of student debt relief claims
   mailto:douglasd@washpost.com?subject=Reader%20feedback%20for%20Education%20inspector%20general%20calls%20on%20agency%20to%20process%20backlog%20of%20student%20debt%20relief%20claims" rel="nofollow -

The U.S. Department of Education’s inspector general issued a  https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/oig/auditreports/fy2018/i04r0003.pdf" rel="nofollow - report  this week urging the Office of Federal Student Aid to take action on tens of thousands of debt forgiveness applications languishing at the agency.

[ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/11/14/pressure-mounts-for-devos-to-address-the-backlog-of-87000-student-debt-relief-claims/?utm_term=.76dde5697b60" rel="nofollow - Pressure mounts for Betsy DeVos to address the backlog of 87,000 student debt relief claims ]

The report puts a fine point on the criticism student advocates and liberal lawmakers have directed toward Education Secretary Betsy DeVos for refusing to process debt relief claims submitted by federal student loan borrowers who were defrauded by their colleges. The inspector general said that while the procedure for processing claims could be improved, the system works well enough that there’s no excuse for the Education Department failing to clear the backlog of pending claims.

The department has the authority to discharge federal student loans when a college uses illegal tactics to persuade a student to borrow money, under a federal statute known as borrower defense to repayment. The team of attorneys working on the applications have flagged nearly 12,000 claims for approval and about 7,200 for denial. But acting under secretary James Manning has refused to sign off on any of those claims, saying the new administration needed time to review the policies put in place by its predecessor, according to the report.

[ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/07/27/trump-administration-is-sitting-on-tens-of-thousands-of-student-debt-forgiveness-claims/?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.d01777177aa1" rel="nofollow - Trump administration is sitting on tens of thousands of student debt forgiveness claims ]

In a letter responding to the inspector general’s report, Wayne Johnson, who heads the student aid office, said his team is working with other units within the department to strengthen protocols so that work on the claims can proceed. He said the discharge of some of the claims flagged for approval is “imminent,” but he failed to provide a timeline.

Johnson agreed with many of the inspector general’s recommendations, including the need to streamline the management of claims and set time frames for processing them. But he took issue with the inspector general’s insistence that the department is putting applicants at risk of accumulating interest and paying more on their loans while awaiting a decision. Johnson said borrowers waiting more than a year for a response will get a break from the department on the interest accumulated on their loans.

[ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/10/24/devos-calls-for-another-delay-of-rule-to-protect-students-from-predatory-colleges/?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.3029f3e58c2b" rel="nofollow - DeVos calls for another delay of rule to protect students from predatory colleges ]

“The report fails to recognize that the change in administrations necessarily required time for the secretary and acting under secretary and their staffs to familiarize themselves with the history of the borrower defense claim review process in order to determine and advise [the office of Federal Student Aid] as to any policy changes that would be made,” Johnson wrote.

Though the borrower defense statute has been on the books since 1995, it was only used in five instances until Corinthian Colleges closed in 2015. The for-profit school spent its last few years battling state and federal lawsuits over alleged fraud, deceptive marketing and steering students into predatory loans — charges that mirror the allegations that brought down ITT Technical Institutes.

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Former students hoped the evidence compiled against those for-profit schools would create a clear path to loan discharges, but they have endured a long wait that for many started under the Obama administration. Obama officials granted relief to Corinthian students in waves, with the vast majority of approvals issued toward the end of the administration. By then, the department had created a more full-throated approach to handling claims, according to the report.

[ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/10/24/devos-calls-for-another-delay-of-rule-to-protect-students-from-predatory-colleges/?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.3029f3e58c2b" rel="nofollow - DeVos calls for another delay of rule to protect students from predatory colleges ]

From July 1, 2016, through President Trump’s inauguration, the department approved more than half of the 46,274 claims it received. In contrast, the Trump administration has received 25,991 claims for loan discharges, and denied two and approved none.

“Hundreds of thousands of students were defrauded and cheated by predatory colleges that broke the law, but today’s report confirms Secretary DeVos tried to shirk her responsibility to these students and shut down the borrower defense program, leaving them with nowhere to turn,” said Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

Monday’s report arrives as DeVos has convened a committee to rewrite the borrower defense statute, a year after the Obama administration revised the rule to simplify the claims process and shift more of the cost of discharging loans onto schools. DeVos suspended the changes before they were scheduled to take effect in July and announced plans to overhaul the law.



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Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.🖖

Marcus Aurelius



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