Today the Department of Education’s Special Master, Joseph A. Smith, released his long awaited third report on the status of providing relief to defrauded federal student loan borrowers.  While we are encouraged to see that the Department has approved slightly over 2,000 borrowers for discharge of their student loans based on misrepresentations about job placement […]

The numbers are in and the results are depressing. No, I’m not talking about Super Tuesday. You may have noticed, at the bottom of our home page, we survey student loan borrowers.  The last survey ended on February 29 and produced the mostly stark results we have seen thus far. We asked people who have […]

The President released his proposed budget yesterday, which included a number of items related to student loans.  We are pleased to see that for the first time, the President’s budget proposes to eliminate the taxation of all loans forgiven or canceled due to a Department of Education program, including disability and death discharges.  (See page […]

Borrowers who had their student loans canceled due to death or disability in 2015 should look out for a 1099-C in the mail this week. With a few exceptions, canceled debt is treated as income. Federal student loan borrowers are eligible for the cancellation of their loans if they are totally and permanently disabled or […]

Today, the Department of Education released a new report outlining a series of statutory, regulatory, and administrative recommendations in response to President Obama’s Student Aid Bill of Rights.  There are some good recommendations for borrowers (e.g. see the recommendation to increase the amount of Social Security benefits that should be protected from offset).  The Department […]

This week, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued its latest supervision report highlighting legal violations uncovered by the Bureau’s examiners.  In this report, it announced that it found that at least one of the Department of Education’s private collection agencies systematically made false and misleading representations to federal student loan borrowers.  The collection agency […]

Nearly two years after our initial request, we are finally able to close the file on our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education. Back in March of 2013, we sent a FOIA request to the Department requesting documents related to the financial incentives and oversight of the 22 private […]

Pounding Student Loan Borrowers: The Heavy Cost of the Government’s Partnership with Debt Collection Agencies, a report produced by the National Consumer Law Center’s Student Loan Borrower Assistance Project, finds that the U.S. Department of Education heavily favors high pressure student loan collection and debt collector profits to the detriment of millions of financially distressed […]

For a number of years, we have been writing about the problems facing borrowers trying to consolidate their loans out of default and into Income Based Repayment (IBR).  The Department of Education was placing borrowers in ICR even if they selected IBR as their preferred payment plan. In May, the Department said that the problem […]