Student Loan Investigation
 

Reportedly some major players in the student loan business offered "inducements" to colleges / universities to become the preferred lenders.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/ed...agewanted=1&hp

I heard about this and I'm interested to see what happens. Several people I know have student loans so big that there's no hope that they'll ever be able to pay them back (in the $100,000+ range) unless they land an out-of-this-world job, and most of them are with a certain lender who has been getting a lot of negative attention lately.

Firings at Major Universities -- Student Loan Scandal

The news report (link below) mentions the very recent departure of financial aid directors at

Columbia
Texas - Austin
Johns Hopkins

http://www.cnn.com/2007/EDUCATION/05...eut/index.html

This just keeps getting better and better and better (in the bad sense, naturally).

I don't think there's any chance the loans will go away. The colleges may have to open the market place to more lenders, but your friends agreed to pay those bills, and they probably aren't getting out of them, unless the lenders didn't disclose the terms of the loan or something.

(Not that I'm suggesting that's what you meant; I just know that some folks with outlandish bills are probably going to latch on to this and hold out false hope.)

When I bought my first house, I qualified for a special mortgage if I went to this class. I think the program was aimed at low income people trying to buy homes. (Yea teaching as career; it can be full time low income work.) Anyway, as part of the class, they pointed out that student loans are the only ones that essentially never go away if they are federally insured loans. You can declare bankruptcy and you still own them. *

You may already know all this, but since I went to a relative cheap state school and didn't have to get student loans, it was news to me.

I guess on the upside, you've got your whole life to repay them. As long as you figure in your payment as a monthly expense, you could finance them out over a long time, maybe.

* I was googling about this, and apparently it just depends on the terms of your bankruptcy. Some can be included, I guess. I don't really know. Maybe the guy teaching our class was just making stuff up.

The shame is, when there is so much money involved, there will be the typical, scratch mine, I will scratch yours!

Damn, that sounds like the USA Congress!:mad:

When a loan is tendered, then it must be paid back and that is the shame as you said, it probably will never be paid back until they put you into the poor house!:(