President Obama announced new executive actions last week to address rising student loan debt burdens. The proposed changes to income-based repayment received the most attention.   The current Pay As You Earn plan has the most favorable terms for borrowers, but is only available to new borrowers (meaning borrowers taking out loans as of July […]

The U.S. Senate Health Education Labor & Pensions Committee (HELP) held a very important hearing a few weeks ago on federal student loan issues.  This was part of a series of hearings to collect ideas for the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. The hearing began with testimony from James Runcie, COO of the Department […]

We have written previously about the problems with parent PLUS loans.  This new issue brief summarizes the ways in which parent PLUS loans can be very dangerous products for borrowers and reasons why schools have incentives to push these loans. Parent PLUS loans can be very dangerous products for borrowers because: The current PLUS loan […]

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued a rule this week that will allow the Bureau to supervise certain nonbank student loan servicers for the first time.  This important move should invigorate oversight of student loan servicing.  The CFPB’s supervisory authority covers any nonbank student loan servicer that handles more than one million borrower accounts.  This […]

Federal Agency Student Loan News November 2013 Department of Education The Department announced a number of important new changes and programs in November, including: 1.  Another round of negotiated rulemaking.  The Department announced its intention to establish a negotiated rulemaking committee to address federal aid program integrity and improvement issues.  Nominations for negotiators are due […]

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) annual ombudsman report focuses on the problems many borrowers face trying to repay private student loans.  We applaud the CFPB report, especially since it is so difficult for borrowers to get relief from burdensome private student loan debt.  The agency also issued an advisory to help borrowers pay off […]

Thanks to so many of you for responding to the new polling feature on our home page.  Your responses reveal some interesting and often surprising results. In the first poll from this summer, we asked if you were having trouble with just federal student loans, just private loans, or both.  About one-third of the approximately 300 borrowers […]

We wrote a few weeks ago about the September 8 New York Times article, “Debt Collectors Cashing in on Student Loans.”  The article explains how student loan servicers and collectors lack incentives to prevent student loan defaults.  Among other reasons, companies are not paid enough to talk borrowers through the federal student loan payment options […]

A recent New York Times article about student loan debt collectors raises a number of important issues that we will be writing about in a series of blogs. The article explains how student loan servicers and collectors lack incentives to prevent student loan defaults.  Among other reasons, companies are not paid enough to talk borrowers […]

We wrote in December about operational breakdowns at the Department of Education, focusing on the Department’s failure to properly place borrowers in “forced consolidation” into IBR.  Shockingly, the Department has yet to fix this problem.  Department staff now tell us it will be resolved some time in 2012, hopefully by May. The response has been […]