College Loan Forgiveness

There's lots that can be done, and it doesn't require any more research that what has already been posted on this thread.

The burden of debt needs to be shifted back to grants and scholarships instead of loans.

Expansion of FAFSA to include government student loans in not having an average of 5% or more on the outstanding balances. This needs to be decreased to a flat prime rate amount.

A parental contribution ratio needs to be lessened for low to mid income under $100K.

Expansion of high school options for college courses and credit.

Standardization of in-state versus out of state tuition and expenses.

The repeal of mandatory housing on campus of room and board options.

These issues are all contributors of debt but not an exclusive list.

And again, not addressing the right now.

Why should 1.3 trillion for 44 million people be forgiven in the present if only 7 million people are defaulting?

Serious question Neptune. What is the trouble you’re having in reading what I actually write?

We can address future solutions when you can explain to me why people who are able to, and are paying their bills should have their debt removed.

I’m not going to veer off in another direction until this is covered.

Doing the right thing for the right people at the right time shouldn't be that hard to explain.

Yet, here we are.

College has become too expense for the masses. To say "just pay the damn bill" is a cop out. I've given you the reasons who, what, how, why and when.

It falls on deaf ears.

It's not any different than wanting health coverage that's affordable. Why shouldn't there be on "out" for people that were taken advantage of? Why are you so unforgiving to people who, no kidding, NEED the help?

At this point you are obviously just trolling and jerking me around.

Even when directly asked multiple times why the people who are Not, repeat, Not having problems paying their loan debt should have their debt forgiven. You just veer off onto this same song and dance.



This conversation ends here.

The conversation doesn't end. It may end your participation, but the conversation will go on.

Again, I've explained why student debt should be zero'd out, even for the ones paying their debt. Because they are paying on way too much debt that is too expensive. You don't get that and you refuse to believe any one of the multiple sources I've provided. You keep asking for more data when it's right in front of you.

We need a new system with better options. Our nation's student population is depending on it. Each and every one of those 44 million students.

I didn't say the conversation is over.

I said this conversation is over. Between you and me.

Related to the general topic, Alaska is cutting funding to their public university system by 41%. The governor wants to increase the payout that Alaska citizens get every year from the state. (No taxes in Alaska, the state pays you.)

The Federal Government made the serious mistake of pumping cheap government capital into a static market for college admissions. The unsurprising chief effect was a sudden and sustained rapid inflation in University tuition costs, driven in part by the rapid addition of unnecessary bureaucratic overhead in the universities themselves. The result was exactly the opposite of the one intended: university education became more expensive and less accessible to most students.

Now to compound the earlier error liberals are advocating the forgiveness of student loans. The result of this is already showing in the growing and highly unrealistic demand for government paid tuition for all.

Perhaps liberals should now also advocate for the government payment of Mortgages for all, or, for that matter, government payment of credit cared debt. Government subsidies have usually unforeseen side effects that often negate their original purpose, and the ongoing university tuition fiasco is a good example.

The only sustainable way to make university education more accessible for all is to expand the number of available seats in such universities, generally funded by states. Pumping more capital into closed markets can have only one result, and that is a rapid and sustained increase in prices.

The fact is the costs of these nonsensical proposals will be paid by everyone through increased taxes and reduced government services in other needed areas. The consequences such unproductive actions will create substantially greater economic harm for everyone.

Oh God. A voice of reason. Thanks georgeob1

Yes, as well as the government paying off all mortgage dept and credit card dept, we also need to include car payments. You forgot that.

Well said about rapid addition of unnecessary beureaucratic overhead/bloat. Where can universities cut some of the pork?

Yes. Who is supposed to pay for all these foregiven loans? In some minds, it's not "fair" that people who can manage their debt have to continue to do so. But how fair is it to the taxpayers and people who now won't get services needed because it was spent on paying off this amount?

Doesn't anyone remember what moderation means? I'm all for helping those in need. Not, let's pay everything because those loan interest rates are just too darn high.

The government has never reached out to pay my debts. I have always been aware that they are/were my responsibility. No matter how much I might have to hold back on a purchase, the debt payments are first. I remember with my student loan, I did postpone/defer payment starting for a year until I was more on my feet financially.


With student loans, banks need to stop handing out insane sums.

Students need to take part time jobs (at the very least) during the school year and try to find a full time spot in the off season. The employment serves 2 purposes: it helps ease overall debt accumulation and it provides a much needed work experience to show the post-college potential employer. A lack of work experience speaks poorly in many ways (including showing a lack of ambition. i.e. laziness.)

As has been pointed out earlier in this thread, there is also that wonderful facility known as the Community College. Take 2 years there or even to for a full undergraduate degree. Most employers are more interested in the fact the person has a degree.

Or, we could get rid of the loan sharks who betray students by forcing them to take out more loans with higher interest rates:

Betsy DeVos cancels Obama-era regulation aimed at holding for-profit schools accountable
PUBLISHED MON, JUL 1 2019 10:02 AM EDTUPDATED MON, JUL 1 2019 5:22 PM EDT
Annie Nova

DeVos issued the final repeal of an Obama-era rule aimed at holding low-quality education programs accountable by forcing them to prove their graduates were able to repay their student debt.

As part of the so-called gainful employment regulation, career education programs, including most for-profit colleges, were required to disclose debt and earnings data to prospective and current students.

Poor-performing programs were at risk of losing their federal funding.
Premium: ITT Technical Institute Campus Anaheim, California

At a recent financial aid conference, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said that every school should help its students graduate with high-quality career prospects and minimal debt.

Students should be equipped, DeVos added, with information that allows them to be responsible consumers. “They need to have the best possible tools, data, advice and support,” DeVos said, at the Georgia World Congress Center in late November.

Yet on Friday DeVos issued the final repeal of an Obama-era rule aimed at holding low-quality education programs accountable by forcing them to prove their graduates were able to repay their student debt.

As part of the so-called gainful employment regulation, career education programs, including most for-profit colleges, were required to disclose debt and earnings data to prospective and current students. Poor-performing programs were at risk of losing their federal funding.

In the first round of debt and earnings data, released in 2017, more than 750 programs failed the gainful employment test. For example, graduates with an associate’s degree in graphic design from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh typically earn less than $22,000 a year and have over $40,000 in federal student loan debt, the Education Department found.

Under the rule, schools that fail the test two years in a row are cut off from federal funding. Since the department is not conducting another debt-to-earnings analysis, no program will lose eligibility under this regulation.

The Education Department said the gainful employment rule imposed a considerable reporting burden on schools “and, in turn, costs to students.”

In addition to holding schools accountable, the rule was intended to provide students “with the best information possible when they’re making one of the biggest investments they’re ever going to make,” said Michael Itzkowitz, a senior fellow at Third Way, a think tank in Washington, D.C.

Critics of DeVos say her decision to rescind the rule is another example of her siding with for-profit schools over students who’ve been burned by them.

Half of student loan borrowers from for-profit colleges wind up in default, according to the Brookings Institution. In a recent report to Congress, the Department of Education’s Inspector General Kathleen S. Tighe said she disagreed with the department’s proposal to rescind the gainful employment regulation without an adequate replacement. She pointed out that for-profit schools have misrepresented their job placement rates and some continue to be a place of fraud and abuse.

The threat of losing government funding forced schools to improve their value, said James Kvaal, president of the Institute for College Access & Success.

Colleges slashed tuition, offered more scholarships, implemented free trials and worked harder to meet industry standards, he said.

“That’s why we’re very troubled that the Department of Education is turning a blind eye,” Kvaal said.

Graduates of closed Kansas college suing Betsy DeVos for millions in loan debt relief
BY MARÁ ROSE WILLIAMS
JULY 05, 2019 05:00 AM, UPDATED 11 HOURS 28 MINUTES AGO

What now for ITT students left hanging?

Metropolitan Community College is among college systems trying to reach out to former students of ITT Technical Institute, which closed locations nationwide in early September. BY RICK MONTGOMERY

Equila Moody was strolling through a mall in 2012 when she saw the storefront advertising Wright Career College, promising a higher education and a career earning a good wage.

Moody saw her chance.

“I wanted to be an accountant or to own my own business,” Moody said. “They told me I could get help to pay for school because I was low income. They said they would help me get the money, and I would be able to pay it back.”

Moody would later find out Wright admissions workers had duped her into racking up $40,000 in student loans, promising she could easily pay it all back with her new job. Worse, she said, her associate’s degree in business administration from Wright was worthless, giving her zero chance of landing a job. On top of that, she could find no other college that would accept the credits she’d worked two years for at Wright. To get a legitimate degree, this unemployed mother of two young children said she would have to start her college education all over again.

Five years after graduating from Wright in Wichita and more than three years after the Overland Park-based career college declared bankruptcy and closed its two campuses in Kansas, as well as in Omaha, Oklahoma City and Tulsa, Moody is still haunted by the decision she made that day to trust the school’s admission counselors. She’s $40,000 in debt. Wages from her low-paying factory job are being garnished. Her financial trap cripples any steps she attempts to take to improve her lot in life.

“It makes me angry, frustrated and upset,” she said. “They were getting that money and not really giving me anything. No degree, no diploma and no knowledge.”

Thousands of former students like Moody across the country are fighting back in the form of lawsuits. The latest:

Last week a suit on behalf of more than 158,000 former students was filed against U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and her department for blocking a program that provided loan relief for victims of fraudulent schools. The suit lists several colleges like Wright that have since closed.

The “borrower defense to repayment” program, created under the Obama administration, had canceled students’ loan debts if a college misled them or broke state laws. Yet under DeVos, June 2018 was the last time any claims were processed.

Moody hopes that by joining the lawsuit she might eventually find relief from her stifling debt. A notable number, 3,137, of students with claims are from Missouri as of January; 964 from Kansas.

They say they were lured and deceived by predatory schools that, with the promise of a quality education and great job prospects, coerced them into borrowing thousands of federal dollars that the college knew the students could never afford to pay back.

“Cheating and lying to students while leaving them with unaffordable debt and no path to the middle class cannot continue,’’ said James Kvaal, president of the Institute for College Access & Success, a nonprofit that is putting a spotlight on how student debt harms families and society.

Most of these schools were for-profit, including ITT Technical Institute, Corinthian Colleges, DeVry University, Vatterott and the Art Institutes, which in recent years have closed, leaving students burdened with thousands of dollars in debt, damaged credit and depleted access to further student aid. Wright was one of the few nonprofit colleges linked with schools described as predatory.

“There were huge amounts of taxpayer dollars going to waste through these schools,” said Beth Stein, vice president of the college access institute. “It is waste, fraud and abuse. Taxpayers’ money was transferred to owners of these schools, and along the way, owners got wealthy and they would leave the students behind.”

The Department of Education “has more or less refused to process any borrower defense claims,” said Stein. “What they are trying to do, we think, is develop a pathway to grant only partial forgiveness instead of full forgiveness on student loan debt.”

She and other advocates are not sure students will prevail against the DeVos administration. “But bringing new pressure on the department to take action is important,” Stein said.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is rescinding an Obama-era rule that aimed to police ineffective for-profit colleges. Department officials said that the 2014 gainful employment rule will be removed entirely effective July 1, 2020.

DeVos also announced last week that her department would repeal another Obama-era restriction requiring for-profit colleges to disclose the debt load of graduates and prove that a certain percentage of graduates obtained gainful employment. If they couldn’t meet the standard, they could no longer have access to federal financial aid.

Instead of the regulation, DeVos said, the department will provide a scorecard on colleges’ records, with no threat of lost federal funding.

The easing of restrictions comes as U.S. student loan debt has climbed to $1.6 trillion.

Earlier this week, U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids, a Kansas Democrat, stopped in at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park — her alma mater — to talk about creative ways to help students manage hefty debt.

“It is really about the future of our economy,” Davids said. She supports legislation that would forgive loans for students going into public service and, down the road, “incentivizing” small businesses to help employees pay down debt.

For now, more students are joining lawsuits to recoup losses.

Last month two Kansas City-area women, former students of National American University, sued the for-profit school, claiming they were tricked into borrowing thousands of dollars in student loans with false promises about the quality of the education and job prospects they would have when they graduated.

Among the alleged victims included in the recent lawsuit against DeVos and the Education Department are 181 former Wright students, who in 2014 were also parties in a suit filed in Jackson County Circuit Court against the school. That lawsuit claimed students were defrauded “through a systematic, deceptive marketing scheme.”

The lawsuit, led by attorneys at the Independence firm Humphrey, Farrington and McClain, was settled in 2017, bringing in $3 million divided among 264 former Wright students.

Moody was not one of them but hopes to join the most recent suit. Attorneys for the law firm said they know that hundreds more students were harmed by the school’s practices but were not part of the earlier lawsuit.

Antoinette Flores of the Center for American Progress said the settlement the Wright students won provides “clear evidence” for the students to prove they were defrauded and they are “perfect candidates for relief under borrowers defense.”

Neil Sader, an attorney who handled Wright’s bankruptcy case, which ended in March, says he sympathizes with the students, to an extent.

“There’s no more money … no more school,” Sader said. “And that’s a shame. In a lot of cases there is no other opportunity for these students to go to any other type of school. And many of them take the opportunity and move life forward. In reality it changed a lot of people’s lives for the better. But there were lots of people who felt the opposite too. I think many of those people didn’t put in the effort that other people did, and then they felt aggrieved.”

Ron Holt, a Kansas City attorney, was a member of Wright’s board at the time it closed. “I disagree categorically,” he said, with any accusations that Wright misled or deceived students. “Wright had scores and scores who completed programs and were placed in various fields. That is a gratuitous allegation.”

He said Wright had no control over other schools not accepting credits from a small, nationally accredited institution. He said Wright met all accreditation criteria, including program completion and career placements, set by the Accrediting Counsel for Independent Colleges and Schools. Wright’s closure had little to do with the lawsuit against it at the time, Holt said. It closed, he said, when enrollment declined and it “ran out of money and ran out of time.”

But Moody says when she showed potential employers her credentials from Wright, she was told they were useless. Still Moody was not ready to quit. She enrolled at Butler Community College in El Dorado, Kansas.

“I flunked out,” she said. By the end of the first semester, “I had failed everything. I didn’t understand how that was possible because I had just taken all these same classes and passed them at Wright.”

Moody reckons now that, “I really wasn’t passing at Wright. They were just passing me through to get the money. They kept coming to me after every semester telling me I had to take out more (loan) money to pay for something or other to finish school.”

Though she had hopes of becoming an accountant, she can only find work on a factory line making less than $25,000 a year to care for herself and her two children.

Victor Washington, another Wright graduate, has a similar tale of woe. Washington said he was living in Kansas City, Kansas, when he started taking classes at Wright. “I grew up in a tough neighborhood,” said the father of three. I had a lot of friends who were getting murdered. I wanted to get out of the hood.”

Washington said when he walked into the admissions office at Wright’s Overland Park campus, “I didn’t have a dime in my pocket. I told them I didn’t have a high school diploma or a GED, and they said that was OK.” This was before 2012, back when federal educators allowed career colleges to enroll high school dropouts with no GED.

He says he graduated at the top of his class. “When I tried to find work, I was told Wright business school wasn’t accredited.” He tried a different school, but the credits could not transfer. “Wright told me they would help us find work. They told us we would get jobs paying $20 or $25 an hour. But when we graduated it was every man for himself.”

Washington now lives in Seattle, where he went looking for work. He owes $20,000 in student loan debt and is working in a warehouse, “doing hard labor unloading trucks” for little money. His wages are being garnished.

“I wish I would have chosen a different school,” he said. “I wasted part of my life even though I was just trying to make my life better. I feel like I was deceived.”

If only that were true:

The pathway to graduation is difficult for many transfer students
Education Feb 23, 2019
By Eric Stirgus, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

About 500 educators and staff recently visited Atlanta to brainstorm ways to help an overlooked segment of college students: transfer students.

A 2017 report to Congress by the federal Government Accountability Office highlighted a problem many face, particularly when enrolling in a four-year college or university. A significant percent of students’ credits are not accepted by their new school, making it more difficult to graduate. On average, students lost 43 percent of their credits, the GAO found during a five-year stretch. Making up those credits is costly. The GAO found “schools often do not offer the same amount of institutional aid to transfer students compared to first-time, non-transfer students.”

Goodness, the transition is daunting. The National Institute for the Study of Transfer Students (NISTS), which is based on the University of North Georgia’s Dahlonega Campus, spent three days exploring ideas at the InterContinental Buckhead hotel.About one in three students transferred from one school during a recent six-year stretch, the GAO reported to Congress, so we’re not talking about a small number of students.

More than 16,000 University System of Georgia students are transfers, according to state data.So why are transfer students losing so many of their credits? One reason is many four-year institutions don’t value credits from the two-year schools. They’re seen as “less academically rigorous or more technical in nature than credits earned at the 4-year school,” according to the GAO report. Another challenge is many students at two-year schools get little or no advice about what courses will be useful at four-year institutions.

Additionally, some community college systems and four-year systems in the same state don’t share information about what academic credentials are required by the four-year schools. The University System of Georgia and Technical College System of Georgia updated their completion plan in 2012, according to one study. A team of researchers looked at the transfer process in Georgia and nine other states for a report completed in May 2016. They concluded the two systems here could communicate a little better and all states should develop data to better monitor how many credits students lose when transferring.

The study quotes an unnamed Georgia official saying “I don’t have that right now” regarding data to completely determine how many credits transfer students are losing.Emily Kittrell, assistant director of the NISTS, told a campus publication one goal of the conference was to make sure more two-year colleges and four-year universities to work together to create transferrable courses that fit bachelor degree requirements.

“Degree pathways” is a term educators use to describe the process.“We don’t want students to waste time and money taking classes that won’t transfer or count toward their intended degrees,” Kittrell said. “Pathways are one way to help them build momentum and get their degree efficiently.”Janet Marling, NISTS director, said, “Transfer is a vital mechanism for closing the equity gap in higher education and providing transfer professionals the opportunity to learn from one another is critical to advancing the field, and by proxy, student success.

The NISTS conference challenged attendees’ to examine their transfer lenses – assumptions, attitudes, and expectations about transfer – and reach beyond individual job descriptions to champion a holistic and intentional transfer student experience for the more than 1 million transfer students attending US colleges and universities.”

Why do you think they DON'T??


Contact:
Hilary Strahota, 202-687-4703
[email protected]

Seventy Percent of College Students Work While Enrolled,
New Georgetown University Research Finds

Twenty-five percent of college students are both full-time students and full-time employees; 19 percent have children

(Washington, D.C., October 28, 2015) – About 14 million college students are working, according to a new report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce (Georgetown Center). For the past 25 years, more than 70 percent of college students have been taking time from their studies to earn a paycheck.

Learning While Earning: The New Normal examines these students who combine work with ongoing learning. “Today, almost every college student works, but you can’t work your way through college anymore,” said Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the Georgetown Center and the report’s lead author. “Even if you work, you have to take out loans and take on debt.” A student working full-time at the federal minimum wage would earn $15,080 annually, which would not cover tuition and living expenses at most colleges.

Working and learning can result in better education and stronger career prospects for students, especially when they work in jobs related to what they study. However, working too much can reduce completion rates for low-income and first-generation college students. In addition, the report finds:

• One-third of working learners are 30 or older. These mature working learners are enrolled primarily to upgrade their credentials and, compared to young people, are more concentrated in career fields like healthcare and business.

• More people are working full-time while in college. About 40 percent of undergraduates and 76 percent of graduate students work at least 30 hours a week; 25 percent of all working learners are simultaneously employed full-time and enrolled in college full-time; and 19 percent of all working learners have children. “We need much stronger connections between learning and work,” said Nicole Smith, chief economist at the Georgetown Center and a co-author of the report. “When students pick a major or field of study, they need to be told up front what kind of career it likely leads to and how much money they are likely to make, especially if they have to pay back student loans.” The Georgetown Center researchers identified several policy changes that would potentially help more of the nation's 14 million working learners to succeed, including:

• Funding postsecondary education based, in part, on performance measured by labor market outcomes;

• Investing in competency-based education programs that teach skills with labor market value; and

• Bolstering employer tuition-assistance programs to offset growing debt.

The full report for Learning While Earning: The New Normal is available online at cew.georgetown.edu/workinglearners.

###

The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce is an independent, nonprofit research and policy institute that studies the
link between individual goals, education and training curricula, and career pathways. The Georgetown Center is affiliated with the Georgetown McCourt School of Public Policy.

For more information, visit: cew.georgetown.edu. Follow us on Twitter @GeorgetownCEW

The Federal subsidies for student loans were simply a cynical effort to gain the allegiance of young voters, clearly taken by politicians who made no serious effort to evaluate the likely consequences.

Medicare for all is another example of such inappropriate promise of government "benefits" designed to gain political allegiance and get votes and power. Like the subsidized student loans, Medicare for all will end up defeating the purpose for which it is allegedly intended. Under this program, the government will determine the services available and the mandatory price for each. In effect Doctors and medical service providers will become employees of the government.

Fewer people will seek careers in the medical profession and many of those who remain will not participate in the new program. As a direct result the accessibility of medical care for current Medicare recipients will be significantly reduced. As another result of the Government bureaucratic controls, innovation and the development of new therapies and treatments will be significantly retarded.

All of this has already occurred in the UK and Canada where government operates the health care system.