Posted on 04/10/2017 4:44:56 AM PDT by C19fan
Ashley Hardin dreamed of being a professional photographer — glamorous shoots, perhaps some exotic travel. So in 2006, she enrolled in the Brooks Institute of Photography and borrowed more than $150,000 to pay for what the school described as a pathway into an industry clamoring for its graduates. “Brooks was advertised as the most prestigious photography school on the West Coast,” Ms. Hardin said. “I wanted to learn from the best of the best.”
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
What a complete idiot this woman was. Zero sympathy.
Who really “preyed” on the student here? The School (which charged a ridiculous amount of $$ for a worthless degree) or the Bank? I would argue the School. They walked away with the $$, while all the Bank got was a default. In fact, the Bank should have had its head examined. But I suspect that they were compelled to treat all student loans equally, regardless of student or institutional quality.
When you read NY Times articles like this, it means a push for nationalization of some kind is coming
They’d be all for it if we changed the word photography and substituted Black Women Studies.
I think it might be erroneous to blame the school. The woman might have graduated and technically proficient but totally lacking in the ability to artistically compose.
What she learned was that she had to actually work and wasn’t able to meet the requirements of a professional working photographer
$150K for photography school is rediculous, but again is the fees at virtually every college. Colleges keep some departments open and viable by requiring nom-degree related courses to ‘broaden the educational environment’. The number of college hours are not necessary to teach the essential courses. Time to completely revamp the college experience, including hours, costs.
A fool and his/her/its money are soon parted. No?
Quote “and borrowed more than $150,000 to pay”..... IDIOT!
>>What a complete idiot this woman was. Zero sympathy.<<
“Perhaps more than any other company, Sallie Mae is synonymous in America with student loans — and, in the years after the lending boom, crushing student debt.”
Why is it taken as Holy Write by the slimes and other lsm outlets that students had guns put to their heads when they signed a document that said “Upon my honor I shall pay this loan of very real money back?”
It infantilzies the signer — I suppose I answered my own question as that is the end-game of liberals.
Correct. So that idiots can take whatever massively overpriced classes they want and feel like, partying for as many years as they feel like, and the common taxpayer will pay for it because of “education”!!!!!!!
My children are working their way through college and are “earning” their degrees. They are not really happy about it, but they seem to understand the why. I guess a classical education from their really intelligent mother, at home, is paying off.
I’m just continually stunned by the cost of a university degree anymore. Mine was about a tenth of that, on campus room and board included. Of course it was over 30 years ago but still I see no rational reason for such a huge increase.
There’s an element of innate ability with fashion photography that can’t necessarily be taught, too, as far as this girl is concerned. Technique can be taught but vision can’t. And, with the explosion of alternative means of capturing images that do not require a professional studio, it’s a questionable choice of expensive degree as far as there being hope of paying down such a loan.
I’d have little problem with Pravda On The Hudson over this article if it once in the last decades wrote about the huge student loans the established 4-year colleges handed out for worthless degrees and for the two or three years worth of courses a student had loans they owed, after having dropped out, because they likely should not have been accepted to begin with.
Ahh, that would put Pravda on The Hudson against all their Marxist friends in academia, so that article won’t happen.
$150K for a photography degree is outrageous. Just my 2 cents.
If God didn't want them sheared, He would not have made them sheep.
“In recent months, the student loan giant Navient, which was spun off from Sallie Mae in 2014 and retained nearly all of the company’s loan portfolio, has come under fire for aggressive and sloppy loan collection practices, which led to a set of government lawsuits filed in January. But those accusations have overshadowed broader claims, detailed in two state lawsuits filed by the attorneys general in Illinois and Washington, that Sallie Mae engaged in predatory lending, extending billions of dollars in private loans to students like Ms. Hardin that never should have been made in the first place.
“These loans were designed to fail,” said Shannon Smith, chief of the consumer protection division at the Washington State attorney general’s office.
New details unsealed last month in the state lawsuits against Navient shed light on how Sallie Mae used private subprime loans — some of which it expected to default at rates as high as 92 percent — as a tool to build its business relationships with colleges and universities across the country. From the outset, the lender knew that many borrowers would be unable to repay, government lawyers say, but it still made the loans, ensnaring students in debt traps that have dogged them for more than a decade.
While these risky loans were a bad deal for students, they were a boon for Sallie Mae. The private loans were — as Sallie Mae itself put it — a “baited hook” that the lender used to reel in more federally guaranteed loans, according to an internal strategy memo cited in the Illinois lawsuit.”
Sallie Mae is a government based entity much like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack.
It is subject to almost exactly the same corruption as those two entities.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack backed predatory sub prime mortgages that were meant to fail. They ended up going bankrupt and costing taxpayers hundreds of billions. Sallie Mae makes predatory sub prime loans for tuition that are meant to fail. These are federally guaranteed loans which means that taxpayers are the ones who ultimately must pay.
This is another example of the massive corruption of the federal government under the Obama administration.
That would be $38k per year. We don’t know how high on the hog she lived. I’d expect she was high maintenance woman with crap for brains
My kid is majoring in astronautical engineering. He should be out-earning me in five years and his education is less than $150K.
I blame her parent for raising a princess unclear on the realities of life.
This all could have been avoided.
This is a misleading article. The real problem is corruption in the Obama administration.
Judicial Watch announced that it today filed a Freedom of Information (FOIA) lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against the U.S. Department of Education seeking records relating to then Obama administration’s “coding error” that resulted in masking that most borrowers are failing to pay down their federally-subsidized student loans (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Education (No. 1:17-cv-00501)).
The Obama administration’s Obamacare legislation also included provisions that resulted in the federal takeover of the student loan industry, which radically increased taxpayer subsidies of higher education loans.
The Education Department acknowledged in early January that the coding error resulted in wildly inaccurate College Scorecard repayment rates. The significance is substantial, according to The Wall Street Journal:
The department played down the mistake, but the new average three-year repayment rate has declined by 20 percentage points to 46%. This is huge. It means that fewer than half of undergraduate borrowers at the average college are paying down their debt.
***
Last month the Government Accountability Office (GAO) projected that loan forgiveness for borrowers enrolled in the plans could cost upward of $108 billion. GAO rapped the department for underestimating the costs due to “insufficient quality controls” and “unreasonable assumptions.” It’s possible the putative “coding error” is connected to this ill-management.
As the Journal notes, “The other scandal is that the Obama Administration used the inflated Scorecard repayment data as a pretext to single out for-profit colleges for punitive regulation.”
Judicial Watch filed today’s lawsuit after the department failed to respond to a January 29, 2017, FOIA request for:
Any records concerning the coding error in the calculation of repayment rate data contained in the College Scorecard, as disclosed on January 13, 2017. . . . Requested records include, but are not limited to, records identifying causes of the coding error and steps taken to correct the error, communications within [the Education Department] regarding the error, communications with third parties concerning the error, and records relating to the public announcement of the error.
“The government-run student loan racket is a disaster for taxpayers and has been abused to target for-profit competitors of liberal-controlled ‘public’ universities,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “The Trump administration should quickly respond to our FOIA lawsuit about this scandal. The Trump administration has an opportunity to drain the swamp in higher education by exposing the truth about their expensive taxpayer subsidies.”
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.