August 29, 2008 – 12:23 pm
Holly Fox, a student at Northwestern’s journalism school, reports on some students being squeezed by loan crisis. There are plenty of stories about students who lost their loans or who could only renew them at a much higher interest rate.
August 29, 2008 – 12:13 pm
The great thing about education is that it teaches you how to reframe a problem until it goes away. According to some two year colleges in this story, a high default rate looks bad. “[D]efault rates are also used by local reporters for measuring how well a school is meeting the needs of its students.” [...]
August 29, 2008 – 12:08 pm
Bloomberg News is reporting that Sallie Mae is reducing its budget for college loans by about 20%. The story doesn’t make it clear whether the banks are giving Sallie Mae the haircut or if Sallie Mae is easing out of the business on its own. In either case, they’re sending the students off to the [...]
August 26, 2008 – 12:14 pm
A number of articles (towntalk, Daily Texan) are targeting the credit cards used and often abused by students. They’re a pain-free way to live the good life but they come with quite a hangover. They’re a big part of the student debt, although they’re really small compared to the money spent on tuition.
August 26, 2008 – 12:09 pm
This article from the Austin Weekly News is asking the right questions. Immediately after pointing out that someone got $10,000 in financial aid, the author points out that there’s still $10,000 in other costs.
August 26, 2008 – 12:06 pm
Or so says a new survey from the National Association of Retail Collection Attorneys. Sounds like repo men with law degrees. Who cares about paying off the debt? Let’s poll the students again in five years.
August 26, 2008 – 12:04 pm
The U.S. Government, in all of its infinite wisdom, decided to offer loan “forgiveness” to people who stay in certain fields for a certain amount of time. It’s sort of like a not-so-hidden subsidy for these fields. Eileen Ambrose from the Baltimore Sun targets it with her column this week. She’s generally upbeat because the [...]
August 25, 2008 – 12:02 pm
Down in Mississippi, it looks like the company Edamerica isn’t going to be able to “release the funds” for the start of the new school year. That is, they don’t have the cash and they’re hoping the Federal government is going to ride in like the calvary and give it to them. Perhaps it will. [...]
August 25, 2008 – 11:56 am
Alan Collinge isn’t afraid of complaining about the high cost of his student loans. He runs a website, StudentLoanJustice.org, that argues quite persuasively that today’s college loan industry is predatory and abusive. Click through to read more. The NY Times wrote about him yesterday and his push to do something about the brutal terms of [...]
August 22, 2008 – 12:58 pm
Money Magazine’s Penelope Wang wrote a great story on why we need to rethink whether college is a good investment. She does a great job of poking holes in the budgets, showing how much of the investment is on “bling”. But in the end, no matter what lawmakers do, college costs will continue to defy [...]
August 22, 2008 – 12:46 pm
We’re so in love with the ideal of college that it twists our thinking. A nice way to get past the idea of college loans being “good debt” is to consider a similar transaction: borrowing money to invest in an athletic career. Would you borrow $1 billion if it could guarantee you a starting job [...]
August 22, 2008 – 12:41 pm
Everyone is starting to catch on. The WSJ points to a great piece from Laura Rowley about the way that huge student debt is gnawing away the stomach lining of the next generation. Rowley says that we need to rethink the idea of college loans being “good debt”. There is no good debt or bad [...]
August 21, 2008 – 1:55 pm
This story from Forbes begins with the tough news about a young man who just graduated from Tufts with a degree in Film Studies and a debt large enough to weigh him down for at least 12 years. He’s moved back home with his parents.
August 21, 2008 – 1:52 pm
A nice new study shows that families generally pay about 85% of the cost of going to college, something that suggests that financial aid and scholarships aren’t as common as anyone would like. Note that families making $100k/year are paying $20k/year for college. Given that taxes usually take $40k of that $100k, college is taking [...]
August 20, 2008 – 12:33 pm
Buried in this story from CBS Marketwatch is a note that Brazos Higher Education Authority is out of the college loan business again. They jumped out in March and came back in May after Congress poured some money on the problem. But now it looks like the money wasn’t enough and the markets are seizing [...]
August 20, 2008 – 12:29 pm
This Baltimore Sun story notes that applications for financial aid are surging and– this is the scary part– the money is needed for food. Johns Hopkins applications are up 38% or 27% depending upon which sentence you read. In either case, it’s clear that the gravy train is imploding.
August 20, 2008 – 12:27 pm
Business Week calls the evaporation of credit a “an important wake-up call for some families who had been financing tuition costs in irrational and expensive ways during the era of easy money and rapidly rising home prices.” That’s one way of putting a smiling face on the rejection letters coming from the loan officers. The [...]
August 18, 2008 – 1:08 pm
Kind articles like this one from the Baltimore Sun’s Eileen Ambrose are appearing as journalists are discovering the size of the education credit crunch. Loan sources are disappearing as everyone wonders who will repay their loans. There’s good advice in these pieces are far as they go, but they’re not reaching the core problem. We [...]
BlogoSquare