Showing posts with label default rates. Show all posts
Showing posts with label default rates. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 8, 2016

Black students and the student loan crisis: African Americans suffer most

Judith Scott-Clayton and Jing Li published a report for the Brookings Institution last month on the disparity in student-debt loads between blacks and whites. Essentially, Scott-Clayton and Li told us us what we should already know, which is this: African Americans are suffering more from student-loan debt than whites.

Scott-Clayton and Li's findings

Here are the report's key findings:
  • On average, blacks graduate from college with $23,400 in college loans compared to whites, who graduate with an average debt load of $16,000.
  • The disparity in debt loads between blacks and whites nearly triples four years after graduation. By that time, the average debt load for African Americans  is $52,726, compared to $28,006 for white graduates.
  • Four years after graduation, black graduates are three times more likely to default on their student loans than whites. For African Americans the rate is 7.6 percent; among whites, only 2.4 percent are in default.
  • Four years after graduation, almost half of African American graduate (48 percent) owe more on their undergraduate student loans than they did when they graduated.
  • Although African Americans are going to graduate school at higher rates than whites, blacks are three times more likely to be in a for-profit graduate program than whites. Among whites, 9 percent enroll in for-profit graduate programs; for blacks, the rate is 28 percent.

Growing debt loads for black graduates and high numbers of blacks attending for-profit graduate programs: Disturbing

In my mind, Scott-Clayton and Li's most disturbing findings are set forth in the last two bullet points. First, almost half of African American college graduates owe more on their undergraduate loans four years after graduation than they did on graduation day,  What's going on? 

Clearly, people who are seeing their total indebtedness grow four years after beginning the repayment phase on their loan are not making loan payments large enough to cover accruing interest.  Those people either defaulted on their loans, have loans in deferment/forbearance, or are making token payments under income-based repayment plans that are not large enough to pay down the principle on their loans.

Surely it is evident that people with growing student-loan balances four years after graduation are more likely to eventually default on their loans than people who are shrinking their loan balances.

Scott-Clayton and Li's finding that a quarter of African American graduates students are enrolled in for-profit colleges is also alarming. We know for-profit colleges charge more than  public institutions and have higher default rates and dropout rates. It should disturb us to learn that blacks are three times more likely than whites to be lured into for-profit graduate programs.

Income-Based Repayment Plans do not alleviate the high level of student indebtedness among African Americans

The Obama administration and the higher education community tout long-term income-based repayment plans (IBRPs) as the way to alleviate the suffering caused by crushing levels of student debt. But as Scott-Clayton and Li correctly point out, new repayment options such as  REPAYE "may alleviate the worst consequences of racial debt disparities," but they fail "to address the underlying causes."

Lowering monthly payments and extending the repayment period from 10 years to 20 or 25 years does not relieve African Americans from crushing levels of student debt. We've got to shut down the for-profit college sector to eliminate the risk that people will enroll in overpriced for-profit graduate programs that are often of low quality..And we've got to fundamentally reform the federal student-loan program so that African Americans and indeed all Americans can graduate from college without being burdened by unreasonably high levels of debt.

References

Judith Scott-Clayton and Jing Li. Black-white disparity in student loan debt more than triples after graduation. Evidence Speaks Reports, Vol. 2, #3, Brookings Institution, October 20, 2016. Available at https://www.brookings.edu/research/black-white-disparity-in-student-loan-debt-more-than-triples-after-graduation/





Sunday, March 6, 2016

Rising Student-Loan Default Rates and Ridiculously High Tuition Costs: The Big Short

We live in an era of fraud in America. Not just in banking, but in government, education, religion, food, even baseball... What bothers me isn't that fraud is not nice. Or that fraud is mean. For fifteen thousand years, fraud and short sighted thinking have never, ever worked. Not once. Eventually you get caught, things go south. When the hell did we forget all that? I thought we were better than this, I really did
Mark Baum (played by Steve Carell)
The Big Short 

The Big Short, the Academy-Award winning movie on the home-mortgage crisis of 2008, shows movie goers how greedy banking institutions created a housing bubble that burst in a shower of home foreclosures and trillions of dollars in financial losses.

A similar bubble has emerged in the federal student-loan program. And although the housing bubble is more complicated than the student-loan bubble, there are some eerie similarities between the collapse of the housing market a few years ago and the student-loan crisis. For example:

Hiding risk. The Big Short includes a scene in which  Mark Baum, a skeptical investment banker played by Steve Carell, quizzes a representative of one the bond rating agencies--Moody's or Standard & Poor. The rating-agency representative admits that  the agency gives mortgage-backed securities  the highest rating--AAA--even  though the agency knows that many of the instruments are packed with risky home mortgages that are headed for foreclosure.

Something similar is happening in the federal student-loan program. Although the Department of Education recently announced that student-loan default rates went down last year--especially in the for-profit sector, that's not really true.  The for-profits have been aggressively signing up their former students in economic-hardship deferment programs that excuse borrowers from making loan payments without being counted as defaulters.

When we look at the five-year default rates in the for-profit sector, the numbers are scary. Almost half the people who took out student loans to attend a for-profit institution default within 5 years of beginning the repayment phase on their loans. And two years after beginning the repayment phase, 3 out of 4 of these students are seeing their loan balances go up--not down--due to accruing interest that is not being paid down.

In short, about half the people who take out student loans to attend for-profit colleges don't pay back their loans. Clearly, this sector of the student-loan program is a train wreck.

Unsustainable rising costs.  As many people still remember, the cost of housing went up rapidly during the early 2000s, with people buying homes and flipping them for huge profits over a matter of months or even weeks. Everybody was making money in real estate--until the housing market collapsed.

Similarly, America has seen college tuition costs rise faster than the inflation rate for many years. The cost of attending law school, obtaining an MBA, or studying at an elite private college has gone through the roof.  I graduated from University of Texas Law School in 1980 and only paid $1,000 a year in tuition. If I enrolled at UT Law School today, it would cost me 36 times as much--$36,000 a year for Texas residents!

Of course, these tuition hikes can't be justified any more than the dizzying cost of a split-level home in Coral Gables, Florida in 2005.  And of course, those costs must eventually come down.  Already, law school enrollments have plummeted and the schools have lowered admissions standards to attract students.  And the elite private colleges are now giving huge discounts on their posted tuition rates; the average freshman now pays about half the college's sticker price.

Hidden costs and fees. Finally, the home mortgage bubble was fueled by greed and fraud. The bankers who packaged mortgage-backed securities were not taking any risks--they took their fees from the transaction costs.  The banking industry was selling toxic financial instruments to gullible investors, including pension funds and people invested in mutual funds.

Similarly, the college industry is charging a gullible public more than a liberal arts degree is worth, and the suckers enroll because, hey, going to Barnard or Brown or Amherst must be a good investment. And the colleges aren't assuming any risks. Their pliant students are borrowing from the federal student loan program, and the government guarantees the loan. Ivy League U doesn't care if its graduates default on their loans any more than Goldman Sachs cared what happened to the investors who bought their mortgage-backed securities.

And the fees! People who default on their loans get assessed huge collection fees and penalties. People are routinely going into the bankruptcy courts trying to discharge student-loan debt that is two or even three times the amount they borrowed due to accrued interest, penalties, and fees.

So if you haven't seen the Big Short, go see it. And as you watch this riveting drama, think about the student-loan program. A bubble is about to burst at a college near you.


Image result for the big short movie

"I thought we were better than this."