Another Day Older and Deeper in Debt: The Student-Loan Crisis is Getting Worser and Worser

"It's a thankless job," Kurt Vonnegut observed in Titans of Siren, "telling people it's a hard, hard Universe they're in."

I know how Kurt feels. I've been writing about the student loan crisis for 25 years. About ten years ago, I started blogging about it.  I've written over 900 essays, and I've gotten a million hits. 

Has anything changed?

The short answer is no. Forty-five million Americans have outstanding federal loans, a total of $1.8 trillion. Americans hold another $150 billion in private student loans, and students' parents owe another $100 billion.

Research confirms that student debt prevents people from getting married, buying homes, and saving for retirement. Indeed, some college graduates would be better off financially had they never gone to college.

Over the years, Congress and the Department of Education have launched various programs to ease the burden of college debt, but everything they do just makes matters worse.

Income-based repayment plans, which set repayment rates based on a borrower's income, have turned nine million student debtors into indentured servants who make monthly payments based on their income, not how much they owe.

The result? Virtually none of those nine million people will ever pay off their student loans because their monthly payments aren't big enough to cover accruing interest. As a practical matter, these college borrowers have defaulted on their loans even though DOE pretends the loans are in good standing.

The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program benefits people who take low-paying service jobs (firefighters, teachers, EMS personnel, etc.). But until recently, only about two percent of the people who thought they were entitled to PSLF debt relief actually got it.

Parent PLUS loans have driven thousands of families into poverty, but Congress refuses to reform the Parent PLUS program. The Wall Street Journal published an essay listing five reasons Congress refuses to act--including the colleges' desire to get Parent PLUS revenue.

When I started writing about the federal student loan program, I viewed it solely as a problem for individual student borrowers--not a boondoggle that could weaken the entire nation.

But it's now clear to me that the program has become so large, corrupt, and mismanaged that it is destroying the integrity of American higher education and undermining the national economy.  Millions of student debtors cannot buy homes, save for retirement, or start families because they are burdened with college debt they can never repay.

Our higher education leaders tell themselves that they are the most sensitive people in America. They constantly prattle about equity, inclusion, and the need to expand opportunities for low-income Americans.

But not a single university president has called for student-loan reform. No college CEO has demanded an overhaul of the Parent PLUS program or legislation to stop the Department of Education from garnishing Social Security checks of elderly student-loan defaulters. 

 Harvard President Lawrence Bacow bent over backward to get a student visa for a single Palestinian, but has this Ivy League prig said anything about a federal program that has injured millions of people, including students at his own university? No, he has not.

University leaders have nothing to say about the federal student loan program because their institutions are addicted to federal money. The status quo suits them just fine.

 After all, if college students graduate with worthless degrees and a mountain of debt, it's not the universities' problem. The colleges get their money upfront.

Harvard University: Ain't we got fun!

Baton Rouge Man Convicted of Massive Student Loan Fraud: Baton Rouge Community College Becomes Crime Scene

 A few days ago, Elliott Sterling of Baton Rouge was convicted of massive student-loan fraud. As reported in the Baton Rouge Advocate, Sterling stole $1.4 million in student loan money by pretending to be a Baton Rouge Community College student 180 times.

Prosecutors also presented evidence that the Sterling falsified student-loan applications for 168 people. In furtherance of his scheme, he bought 42 fake high school transcripts, paid people to represent themselves as students, and filed false information on student-aid applications.

Sterling's criminal scheme went on for two years. FBI agents seized $422,000 in fraud proceeds, but Sterling blew a great deal of money at gambling casinos.

Apparently, numerous people helped Sterling bilk the federal government. He collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in student-loan money intended for other people and kept two-thirds of the proceeds. He even enlisted the help of a couple of people in prison.

Sterling's convictions raise several questions. First, did any of the bogus students at BRCC attend classes?  Did they receive grades? How long did it take BRCC to realize that someone was using the college to scam the federal student-loan program?

Of course, all the people who took out student loans as part of Sterling's scheme are indebted to the Department of Education and required to pay back the money they were awarded. How many of these "students" will pay back their loans?  My guess is that none of them will.

College leaders and the U.S. Department of Education would like Americans to believe that the federal student loan program is competently administered and that federal loan money helps students get a valuable college education.

In fact, the student loan program is riddled with fraud and mismanagement. Several for-profit colleges have been accused of misrepresenting their programs; some individuals take out loans just to capture the income with no intention of studying for a college degree. Hundreds of colleges have rolled out dodgy graduate programs to enhance their revenues, leaving students with worthless MBAs and professional diplomas.

Today, 45 million Americans collectively owe $1.8 trillion in student debt. Parents have impoverished themselves by taking out Parent PLUS loans to help their offspring pay their college bills. Private lenders have loaned another $150 billion to students at high-interest rates.

It is time for Americans to admit that higher education in this country is a racket. Congress doesn't have the courage to legislate reforms. But surely, our federal legislators can summon the political will to amend the Bankruptcy Code to allow the victims of this massive fraud scheme to discharge their student loans through bankruptcy.

Baton Rouge Community College: A crime scene

How Screwed Up is the Federal Student Loan Program? We Can Tell You, But Then We'd Have to Kill You!

 Betsy DeVos, the Wicked Witch of the Midwest, was perhaps the most despised member of President Trump's cabinet. As Trump's Education Secretary, she coddled the for-profit college industry and (in my opinion) bungled the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program.

Nevertheless, in a speech delivered in November 2018, DeVos revealed to the nation just how totally screwed up the federal student loan program really is. She deserves some credit for that.

Here's what DeVos said:

• The federal government holds $1.5 trillion in outstanding student loans, one-third of all national assets.

• Only one in four federal student-loan borrowers were paying down the principal and interest on their debt.

• Twenty percent of all federal student loans were delinquent or in default, which was seven times the delinquency rate on credit card debt.

• The debt level of individual borrowers had ballooned between 2010 and 2018 because students were borrowing substantially more money.

• The federal government's portfolio of outstanding student loans constituted 10 percent of our nation's total national debt.

Soon after giving this speech, DeVos engaged a private firm to determine just how bad the student loan crisis was. Jeff Courtney, a former JP Morgan executive, headed up this investigation, and here is what he found:

Although DOE calculated that it would eventually receive 96 cents of every student-loan dollar in default, in fact, it would only recover between 51 and 63 percent.

Courtney also found that DOE allows student-loan defaulters to sign up for new loans, which are used to pay off the defaulted loans. When that happens, the defaulted loans are categorized as paid in full when, in fact, they aren't paid off at all.

DeVos acknowledged that private businesses could not legally operate in this way. In fact, she said, if a private actor engaged in DOE's accounting practices, that person would "probably be behind bars." 

Of course, we know that Courtney's findings aren't the only evidence of DOE's financial skulduggery.  DOE has been putting distressed debtors into income-based repayment plans (IBRP) and counting the loans in these plans as performing loans.

But that is not correct. Approximately 9 million student borrowers are in IBRPs, and their monthly payments are not large enough to pay accruing interest. Thus, IBRP participants see their loan balances grow with each passing month, even when they make regular monthly loan payments. 

In fact, all 9 million IBRP participants are in default--if default means never paying off the debt.

In recent months,  Congressional members have been asking DOE to disclose the actual cost of the federal student loan portfolio, but Education Secretary Miguel Cardona hasn't been forthcoming.

Here is the essence of the matter. DOE knows the federal student loan portfolio is a trainwreck, but it hopes to keep the catastrophe a secret for as long as possible.  

It's like that old joke about the  CIA and classified information: We can tell you the truth about the student-loan program, but then we'd have to kill you.

Sources

Betsy DeVos. Prepared Remarks by U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to Federal Student Aid's Training Conference. November 27, 2018. [The DOE link to this speech  was either taken down or obscured.]

Betsy revealed just how screwed up the federal student loan program really is.

Like Prisoners on Death Row: 25 million student debtors may get another reprieve from making their student-loan payments

Around 2,500 prisoners sit on Death Row in American prisons. Nearly 700 condemned men await death in the Golden State of California. A couple hundred are housed on Death Row in Texas, the Lone Star State. And Florida--the Sunshine State-- has 330 prisoners who've been sentenced to die.

How long do condemned prisoners sit in prison before being executed? On average, 19 years. Most men on death row can postpone their execution date by filing multiple appeals in the courts.

Of course, Americans living in freedom cannot compare their situation to the men on Death Row. Nevertheless, student-loan debtors are somewhat like condemned prisoners. They are seeing their lives drain away while the federal government issues multiple stays of execution on their student-loan payments without giving them real relief.

In March 2020, the Department of Education allowed 25 million student debtors to stop making payments on their loans due to the economic disruption of the COVID pandemic.  DOE said it would not penalize borrowers who didn't make their loan payments and wouldn't charge interest on the underlying debt.

That moratorium has been extended four times, and the Biden administration may extend the moratorium yet again.

Are these debt-forgiveness edicts a good thing for the nation's overburdened student-loan borrowers? Yes, of course.

But there are psychological and emotional costs to being burdened by debt that can never be paid back, costs that some federal bankruptcy courts have explicitly recognized. And these costs are not alleviated by giving college borrowers a series of loan holidays.

And allowing 25 million Americans to skip their student-loan payments for two years does nothing to solve the student-loan crisis, which has grown to catastrophic proportions. Together, American college borrowers owe $1.8 trillion in student debt and another $150 billion in private student debt.

Maybe President Biden will forgive $10,000 in personal student debt as he promised during the 2020 presidential campaign. But that will do little or nothing to ease the debt burden of most borrowers.

Perhaps Congress will pass legislation to forgive all federal student-loan debt, or President Biden will do that by executive order. But I think relief of that magnitude is unlikely.

In the meantime, while our legislators and policymakers ponder global solutions,  why doesn't Congres simply amend the Bankruptcy Code to allow insolvent student borrowers to discharge their student loans in bankruptcy?

But Congress probably won't do that. For all the sympathetic rhetoric, Congress is content to allow millions of Americans to sit helplessly in a vast debtor's prison without bars--financially unable to buy homes, save for retirement, or start families.

In the meantime, college borrowers live much like the men on Death Row. Like condemned prisoners, they get numerous reprieves from making payments. They get deferments, they sign up for long-term income-based repayment plans, and they get to skip loan payments during the COVID crisis. 

Condemned prisoners whose sentences are postponed again and again will never be free. Some will eventually be executed, but many of them will die of old age.

Likewise, America's student loan debtors can manage their massive loan debt with various types of reprieves. They can apply for economic-hardship deferments. They can sign up for long-term, income-based repayment plans. They can skip payments during the COVID loan-payment pauses.

But millions of them will never be free of their college debt. They will die before it's repaid. That's a high price to pay for going to college.

 

California's death row

A student-debt strike to pressure Congress for wholesale student-loan forgiveness simply won't work

Student Debt Strike, an online Reddit community, advocates for a mass student-debt strike as the best way to pressure Congress to grant wholesale student-loan forgiveness.  I totally support this group's goals.

Economist Stephanie Kelton and others have argued persuasively that forgiving all federal student-loan debt would stimulate the economy. Relieved of burdensome student loans, more than forty million Americans would be free to buy homes, start families, and save for their retirement. 

Furthermore, I agree with Professor Kelton, who believes the federal government can handle massive student-loan forgiveness without wrecking the economy. The feds can simply select one of its many accounting gimmicks to absorb the loss, much as it dealt with the savings-and-loan crisis in the 1980s, the real-estate turmoil of 2008, and Puerto Rico's bankruptcy.  

After all, $1.7 trillion in outstanding student-loan debt is peanuts to a nation with a federal deficit that tops $30 trillion. What's $1.7 trillion among friends?

Nevertheless, it is dangerous for people to participate in a student-loan strike by refusing to make their monthly loan payments.

First, defaulting on a student loan is catastrophic for the individual debtor. Interest and penalties add up and get added to the loan balance. Over time, a student-loan defaulter's loan balance can double, triple, and even quadruple.

Moreover, student-loan defaulters rarely get free of student-loan debt in bankruptcy.  Congress inserted the "undue hardship" rule into the Bankruptcy Code to discourage bankruptcy relief. Many bankruptcy judges interpret "undue hardship" quite harshly and refuse to discharge student debt even when the debtor is in desperate circumstances.

Secondly, I do not believe a student-loan strike will have the desired effect on Congress. Thus far, Congress has shown little appetite for reforming the federal student loan program. Political pressure from the higher education industry (including the for-profit colleges) has blocked reform.

Besides, a significant percentage of college borrowers are already on strike because they have defaulted on their student loans. In a 2018 report, the Brookings Institution calculated that 40 percent of student borrowers may ultimately default on their student-loan obligations. If that is not a strike, I don't know what is.

If I thought a student-debt strike had any chance of succeeding, I would support it 100 percent. But I'm afraid strikers will simply be labeled as deadbeats without moving the needle on reform or loan forgiveness.

Much as I hate to admit it, I think the best option for an overburdened college-loan debtor is to sign up for the most generous income-based repayment plan that is available.

Someday, the student-loan crisis will become so massive and so scandalous that Congress will be forced to act--either by canceling all student debt or easing the path to bankruptcy relief. 

Unfortunately, I think that day is a long way off. 

"LSU administrators paid at outrageous levels, with faculty far behind:" Professor A.R. Rau's letter to the Baton Rouge Advocate

Professor A.R.P Rau published a letter to the editor of the Advocate this morning. I am printing the letter in its entirety.

LSU recently hired a football coach for an obscene $100 million. Athletic directors, other coaches, and umpteen assistant coaches have million-dollar salaries. And now the revenue secretary who is stepping down from state government is being hired as “chief administrative officer” at LSU for $370,000 in place of her previous $250,000.

LSU’s chancellor-president was recently hired for $750,000 plus substantial house and car allowances. There is a provost, and multiple vice chancellors and vice provosts, all making equally impressive six figures.

Why then is a new administrative officer needed, created by fiat by administrators and the LSU Board of Supervisors? This is taxpayer money.

The rot started with then-chancellor Mark Emmert. By bringing Nick Saban as a multi-million-dollar coach, he parlayed that to doubling his own salary, out of all proportion to salaries of faculty or staff. He went to his own further millions at the NCAA but left behind administrators down the line, all making huge salaries, more than double that of professors with decades of teaching, research and scholarship.

This has been noted elsewhere as “rapacious contemporary capitalism” at institutions that were created by societies for different purposes. It is an abuse of the tax-exempt status granted them on the grounds that knowledge generated and taught is a societal good.

LSU’s worth rests on its performance in education. Hiring contingent faculty at fractions of even the smallest numbers cited above, and grudging graduate teaching assistants who are paid even less minus health insurance and other fees they then must pay out of pocket, is shameful.

I leave as an exercise to our boards to calculate how many assistant professors, adjunct instructors, and graduate TAs would be supported by that $370,000 they conjured out of thin air for this new administrative hire.

A.R.P. RAU
professor
Baton Rouge

Revenue Secretary Kimberly Lewis will make $370,000 in new LSU job

Wind turbines have raped West Texas and the Great Plains: I hate the goddamn things

  John Prine wrote a lovely song called Paradise, a tribute to the landscape of his childhood, located "down by the Green River, where Paradise lay."

But that landscape was destroyed by strip mining, as Prine's lyrics attest. "I'm sorry my son, you're too late in asking; Mr. Peabody's coal trains have hauled it away."

Progressive Americans hate coal as they hate all fossil fuels. They lament the damage that was done by strip mining.

Let's stop drilling for oil and gas, they say. Let's stop mining for coal. Let's switch to renewable energy: solar power and wind power.

And the nation is going in that direction, faster than most Americans realize.  Enormous wind turbines are being erected on the Great Plains, turbines so large than an 18-wheeler can only transport one turbine blade at a time.

Year by year, wind power supplies a larger percentage of the nation's energy demands. But you have to drive over the High Plains to grasp the scope of the transformation.

Drive along Highway 84 across the Llano Estacado or motor up Highway 281 in western Oklahoma. Wind turbines by the thousands blight the landscape.

If you live in Boston, you may say that is all to the good. Sure, wind turbines destroy the grandeur of the prairie country, the majestic vistas of West Texas. But who cares?

After all, the nation's truly beautiful scenery only exists on America's East and West Coasts and in blue-state Colorado.  Nobody lives in West Texas, and those who do are elderly white people with non-progressive values who need to be ground down for the greater good.

But I disagree. The vast, lonely panoramas of the trans-Brazos country, the undulating hills of the Oklahoma short grass country are beautiful--as beautiful as the Rockies or the seascapes of California. This country once sustained the Kiowa, the Comanche, and the Cheyenne, who lived off the buffalo that grazed these lands in the millions.

If our national policy is to pollute our natural environment with wind turbines, I say let's share the pain. I will reconcile myself to wind turbines in West Texas when I can see them off the beaches of Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, and the Hamptons.