Showing posts with label REPAYE. Show all posts
Showing posts with label REPAYE. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Why the Obama administration launched its REPAYE plan: It had no choice

Late last year, the Obama administration's Department of Education launched its eighth student-loan repayment program, labeling it REPAYE.  Very similar to a previous Obama initiative titled PAYE, the REPAYE program allows college-loan borrowers to pay off their student loans over 20 years. The chief new feature of REPAYE is broader eligibility. Nearly every student-loan debtor will qualify to participate in the REPAY program.

Under both PAYE and REPAYE, college-loan debtors make monthly payments based on their income, not the amount they borrowed. Payment rates are established annually, based on the borrower's reported income for the previous year, with payments calculated to equal10 percent of the borrower's discretionary income.

In many ways, REPAYE is a good deal for overburdened student-loan debtors. Monthly payments will be lower than the standard 10-year repayment plan; and payments will be allowed to fluctuate as borrowers' income goes up or down. People who are unemployed or who live at the poverty level won't be required to make any payments at all.

All in all, the Obama administration's latest student-loan program is incredibly generous. In fact, most debtors on the REPAYE plan will be making monthly payments so low that they won't cover accruing interest on their loans. In other words, at the end of the 20-year repayment program, most debtors will still have large balances on their loans, which will be forgiven.  The forgiven amount will be absorbed by taxpayers.

Why did the Obama administration launch REPAYE, which could reasonably criticized as fiscally irresponsible? I will tell you why: it had no choice.

For years, the government has permitted overburdened student-loan debtors to enroll in economic hardship deferment programs and other forbearance plans that allowed borrowers to temporarily skip their monthly student-loan payments. Colleges encouraged this practice as a way to keep their short-term  student-loan default rates down--particularly the for-profit colleges, which needed to keep their default rates below 30 percent in order to continue receiving federal student-aid money.

For some people on these plans, however, the forbearances weren't temporary--they stretched out for years while interest accrued on their original debt. Thus for virtually everyone in a forbearance or deferment program, their loan balances were getting larger with each passing month due to accruing interest.

This phenomenon was documented in a recent Brookings Institution report written by Looney and Yanelis. These scholars found that loan balances were going up, not down, two years into the repayment period for more than half of student-loan borrowers in repayment.

In fact, for millions of people who have had their student loans in nonpayment status for any considerable period of time, it has become virtually impossible to to pay back their loans. This state of affairs drove many debtors into default, which caused their balances to grow even larger due to the penalties and fees that got tacked on to their debt.

President Obama and Arne Duncan could see that there were only two ways out of this morass. Either people must be allowed to file for bankruptcy to discharge their college-loan debt or their loans have to be refinanced to make the monthly payments lower. Since bankruptcy reform is politically impossible, Obama and Duncan chose to launch PAYE and REPAYE.

But there are enormous problems with the Obama administration's fix. First, most people entering PAYE and REPAYE are not enrolling immediately after graduating from college. Most struggle for a few years to make payments under the standard 10-year plan and then enter REPAYE because they can't service their loans. For these people, enrolling in a 20-year repayment plan extends their repayment period out over their entire working lives.

Butler v. Educational Credit Management Corporation, decided earlier this year, illustrates this problem. Beverly Butler struggled for almost 20 years to make payments on loans she took out to get her college degree, which she obtained in 1995. Eventually, she enrolled in a 25-year repayment plan that stretches out her loan repayment period until 2037--42 years after she graduated from college!

And of course the other big problem with PAYE and REPAYE is that most people in these programs are not paying back their loans at all; they are making token payments that don't cover accruing interest. In essence, these programs are designed to disguise the fact that for all practical purposes, people in long-term repayment programs have defaulted on their loans.

This is no small matter. Almost 5 million people are in income-based repayment plans now; and the Department of Education wants to enroll 2 million more by the end of next year. Without question, REPAYE is going to be the default option for most student-loan debtors in the years to come, which is what the Brookings Institution and other higher-education industry insiders want to happen.

In reality, the Obama administration has imposed a tax on most people who borrow money to attend college;  REPAYE participants will be obligated to pay a percentage of their incomes for a majority of their working lives in return for the privilege of going to college.

How ironic. Barack Obama, self-proclaimed friend of the disadvantaged, has established a huge sharecropper program for college goers. Ultimately of course, all Obama did was buy time for the college industry. In the long run, REPAYE can't sustain the status quo. At some time in the not too distant future, higher education as we now know it will collapse.

And the first cards to fall in this house of cards will be the for-profit colleges and the small private liberal arts colleges. Be patient. You don't have long to wait.

Enrollment at four-year for-profit colleges declined 9.3 percent from last year, and the University of Phoenix's enrollment has declined by half from its peak years. The private liberal arts colleges are behaving like a Texas fireworks stand (Buy One, Get One Free!!), discounting tuition for first-time freshman by 48 percent.

The end is near.

 References

Erin E. Arvedlund. A new way, REPAYE, to get out of college debt. Philadelphia Inquirer, March 29, 2016. http://articles.philly.com/2016-03-29/business/71877131_1_income-based-repayment-plan-loan-debt-standard-repayment-plan.

Adam Looney & Constantine Yannelis, A crisis in student loans? How changes in the characteristics of borrowers and in the institutions they attended contributed to rising default rates. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution (2015). Accessible at: http://www.brookings.edu/about/projects/bpea/papers/2015/looney-yannelis-student-loan-defaults

Rick Seltzer. Discount rates rise yet again at private colleges and universities. Inside Higher Ed, May 16, 2016. Accessible at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/05/16/discount-rates-rise-yet-again-private-colleges-and-universities.

Kelly Woodhouse. (2015, November 25). Discount Much? Inside Higher Ed. Accessible at: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/11/25/what-it-might-mean-when-colleges-discount-rate-tops-60-percent?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=389f6fe14e-DNU20151125&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-389f6fe14e-198565653

Enrollments slide, particularly for older students. Inside Higher Ed, May 24, 2016. Accessible at https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2016/05/24/enrollments-slide-particularly-older-students?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=74ec3a191d-DNU20160524&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-74ec3a191d-198564813




Friday, December 18, 2015

Deeper into the abyss: Obama introduces REPAYE, yet another income-based student-loan repayment plan designed to turn students into sharecroppers

This week, the Obama administration introduced REPAYE, a new student-loan repayment plan.  Like PAYE ("Pay As You Earn"), REPAYE allows borrowers to pay back their student loans over a 20 year period and to make monthly payments no larger than 10 percent of their discretionary income.  REPAY, however, is available to borrowers who were not eligible for PAYE.

What is the significance of this new development?

It's complicated.  First of all, REPAYE is the federal government's fourth income-based repayment plan. We now have:

  • ICR Plan (Income-Contingent Repayment Plan)
  • IBR Plan (Income-Based Repayment Plan
  • PAYE (Pay  As You Earn Repayment Plan
  • REPAYE (Revised Pay As You Earn Repayment Plan)

Not all borrowers are eligible for all plans, and some plans are more favorable to debtors than others. DOE issued a 26-page set of guidelines called "Income-Driven Repayment Plans: Questions and Answers," but the guidelines are complicated.

Here is a sample passage:
The REPAYE, PAYE, and IBR plans offer an interest benefit if your monthly payment doesn't cover the full amount of interest that accrues on your loans each month. Under the three plans, the government will pay the difference between your monthly payment amount and the remaining interest that accrues on your subsidized loans for up to three consecutive years from the date you begin repaying the loans under the plan. Under the REPAYE Plan, the government will pay half the difference on your subsidized loans after this three-year period, and will pay half the difference on your unsubsidized loans during all periods.
Millions of people are already confused by their student loans. Some don't know if they have private loans or federal loans, some don't know how many loans they have, some don't know how much they borrowed or what they now owe, and some people don't even know that they took out a student loan.

For the 20 million people who aren't able to make loan payments under a standard 10-year repayment plan, REPAYE is not going to offer much relief.  It's just another level of bureaucracy and administrative regulations.

REPAYE is a new sign of desperation. Second, REPAYE is just another sign of the federal government's desperation about the federal student loan program. As the New York Times noted a few weeks ago, 10 million people have either defaulted on their student loans or are delinquent in their payments.  About 4 million are making payments under the government's first three income-based repayment plans; and most are not making payments large enough to cover accruing interest.  And a bunch more have gotten some kind of deferment from making loan payments based on economic hardship.

The government's response to all this chaos and misery is to roll out ever more generous long-term repayment plans.  But this strategy hides the fact that millions of people on these plans will never pay back the principle on their loans and for all practical purposes are in default.

REPAYE is really just a program for turning college students into sharecroppers for the federal government.  But the real problem with REPAYE, with PAYE and with IBR and ICR are that these plans force millions of people to make payments to the federal government for a majority of their working lives in return for the privilege of attending college.  In effect, the government is turning our nation's young people into a generation of sharecroppers.

And remember, for most people, these 20- and 25-year repayment plans don't begin when students graduate from college. Often former students struggle for five years or more with their student loans before they finally sign up for a long-term repayment plan.  And that's when the long-term repayment plan starts.  Thus a person who graduated in 2010 and joins an income-based repayment plan this year, will not be free of student loan debt until 25 or 30 years after first enrolling in college.

President Obama, Arne Duncan, the Brookings Institution, and higher education leaders like Vassar's Catharine Hill hail long-term repayment plans as a solution to the growing student-loan crisis. But of course, these plans are not a solution at all. They're a strategy for turning Americans into indentured servants.

Image result for sharecroppers images
Go to college and become a sharcropper!


Image result for catharine hill vassar
Vassar's Catharine Hill: What the kiddies need is a nice long-term repayment plan!



Thursday, December 17, 2015

Interest, fees and penalties are burying millions of student-loan debtors--not the amount these poor people borrowed to go to college

Sometimes, huge problems can be analyzed best by simply boiling down the complexity of a situation into a simple phrase.  For example, "It's the economy, stupid," crafted by Democratic political strategist James Carville, summarized a central theme of Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign.

Likewise, we can summarize at least one huge element of the student-loan crisis by focusing on one core fact: accrued interest, penalties and fees are burying millions of student-loan debtors, not the amount of money these poor people borrowed to attend college.

For example, I have a friend on the East Coast who borrowed a total of about $55,000 to obtain a bachelor's degree and a graduate degree; and he paid nearly $14,000 on those loans.  Unfortunately, my friend suffered a series of unfortunate life events--health issues, divorce, and job loss.  Now at age 67, he is living entirely on Social Security and a small pension. The Department of Education is garnishing his meager retirement income, and he is living on only $1200 a month.

A few weeks ago, my friend filed an adversary complaint in bankruptcy court, seeking to discharge his student-loan debt based on the Bankruptcy Code's "undue hardship" provision. Guess how much the government says he owes? $120,000--including accrued interest and $23,000 in collection costs. That's more than twice the amount my friend borrowed.

And this case is not atypical. In Halverson v. U.S. Department of Education, Stephen Halverson borrowed about $132,000 to obtain two master's degrees. Just as with my East Coast friend, life happened for Mr. Halverson: a job loss, serious health issues, a divorce, medical expenses for a child, and expenses incurred to care for an aging parent.

At times, Mr. Halverson was unable to make payments on his student loans, but he obtained a series of economic hardship deferment, and he was never in default.  Nevertheless, when Halverson was in his 60s, it was clear he could never pay back his student loan debt. By the time he filed for bankruptcy, his total deb had ballooned to almost $300,000--more than twice the amount he had borrowed. And Mr. Halverson's job at that time only paid $13.50 an hour.

Various public-policy analysts have argued that there is no student-loan crisis because most people borrow relatively modest amounts of money--typically about the amount of a car loan. But these analysts ignore two key facts:

1) Even a small student loan is a huge burden for someone who doesn't have a job or who has a low-income job.

2) People who are unable to make their monthly loan payments must obtain an economic hardship deferments or enter a long-term repayment plan in order to avoid default. And both options mean that the debtor's loan balance goes up due to accruing interest.

Thus we see people like Liz Kelly, featured in a recent New York Times article, who owes $410,000 on her student loans, far more than she borrowed to attend college and graduate school. Today, at age 48, the annual interest cost on her indebtedness is more than the entire amount she borrowed to obtain her bachelor's degree!

And I know a man in California who borrowed around $70,000 to finance his education, and paid back about $40,000. Now the Department of Education claims he owes more than $300,000, including a one-time penalty assessed in the amount of $59,000! That one penalty is more than 80 percent of the entire amount he borrowed!

Surely it should be apparent to everyone--even Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, President Obama and Congress--that adding interest, fees and penalties to people's student-loan debt only increases the likelihood of default.

The higher education industry and the Department of Education have embraced economic-hardship deferments and long-term repayment plans because both programs hide the fact that millions of people can't pay off their student loans.

Does anyone think, for example, that Liz Kelly, who was unable to pay back the $25,000 she borrowed to get an undergraduate degree, will ever pay back the $410,000 she currently owes.? Does anyone think my East Coast friend, who is living on about $1,200 a month, will ever pay back $120,000?

Like a seething volcano about to erupt, pressure is building on the federal student loan program. Currently, about 41 million Americans owe a total of $1.3 trillion in outstanding student loans. Let's face it: at least half that amount will never be paid back.



References

Kevin Carey. (2015, November 29). Lend With a Smile, Collect With a Fist. New York Times, Sunday Business Section, 1. Accessible at: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/upshot/student-debt-in-america-lend-with-a-smile-collect-with-a-fist.html?_r=0


Halverson v. U.S. Department of Education, 401 B.R. 378 (Bankr. D. Minn. 2009).