Posted on 11/06/2009 8:58:57 AM PST by longtermmemmory
KANSAS CITY, Mo. College students are facing a sea change in borrowing to pay for their degrees unfortunately, many would still be drowning in debt.
The change, perhaps as soon as July, would end the Federal Family Education Loan program that has dominated the federal student loan pool for more than 40 years.
Banks and other private sources would be cut out of the process by the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, passed in September by the U.S. House. The measure still must be considered by the Senate.
Colleges that once kept a long list of lenders are converting to the Direct Loan Program, in which student loans come directly from the government.
The trend was accelerated by many private lenders dropping out of the business when the economy tanked. That led Congress to pass temporary legislation expiring in June to assure that students and families still would be able to get loans for school.
In the last two years, students already were relying more on federal loans. The volume of loans from private sources fell by 52 percent in the 2008-2009 school year, according to a recent report by the College Board, a nonprofit organization that watches trends in higher education.
"Moving to direct lending will ... eliminate the uncertainty families have experienced due to the turmoil of the financial markets," said Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
That's all well and good, said Tony George, director of financial aid at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, which is preparing to switch to the Direct Loan Program by December. But the cost of borrowing would remain the same as under the old system.
(Excerpt) Read more at sun-sentinel.com ...
Force the private sector out.
Now they have forced private student loan lenders out via "choice".
So consider this, if you don't support "the party" then no student loans for you.
Not only political “tests” in the application process, but requirements for “community service”, i.e., certain political activities while in college and while paying off the loan.
One word:
Slavery
how about, “you are only approved to attend THESE schools...”
Obama the president who brought slavery BACK to the USA.
The rules will be drawn to squeeze the middle class and reward minorities..regardless of economic status.
College tuition will continue to soar and your kids will graduate to high taxes and indentured servitude to the govt. Awfull..the current student loan program is bad enought. I go my kids done with no loans. They had to work while in school and we muddled along. But I refused to have them saddled with student loans.
One of the problems of college tution stems from the notion of “borrowing” money to attend. Since they know you can get the money they jack the rates up, it used to cost me only a few hundred a semester when I went school and you could make that in the summer and attend the whole year focused on your studies without having to work, today you are expected to borrow as much as the purchase of a house, why would anyone do that if they could just buy a house and still have the value, not to say education has no value, but it maybe not worht hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I agree with you...it seems the idea is to get everyone in this country in debt up to their eyeballs as soon as possible through car loans, home loans, credit cards and education debt.
Why not learn the skills you need to do a particular job on your own, work the four years you would have attended college and have four years experience on your peers that majored in art history with a minor in english.
Education is a waste of time unless you are pursuing engineering, finance or law (and preferably two of the three.) In my opinion, it is hard to make a case for paying today’s tuition for any of the liberal arts programs.
“Education is a waste of time unless you are pursuing engineering, finance or law”
While I agree that majoring in communications (isn’t that talking?) or women’s studies/american cinema etc (would you like paper or plastic?) or even anthropology (would you like a large or small fry with your burger?) are mostly a waste of time and money...
I think my kids’ Nursing Major is a worthwhile college education! But I encouraged both of them to attend an excellent state college and not spend the extra premium money on a fancy private college.
I love art and literature but I also agree with you that it maybe not worth such a massive price tag. Someone once said we are all greater artists than we realize, and I mean that in the sense that we are constantly creating what we choose to perceive every second of every day.
Thanks to the federal reserve and various government programs we have highly infalted costs for just about everything, education being another in a long list. I studied the arts but I paid a pittance compared to what goes for tutition today, in fact I don’t think I would have studied it at all had I had to pay such high costs as today.
Finance and law seem to be the order of the day, but it seems more like religion to me at times, the cult of “natural law” but it helps pay the bills! That leaves engineering and that seems exciting to me still, areas such as quantum physics seem to be the cutting edge of science, though I don’t think anyone has any real sense of how uncertain that actually appears, though it also pays the bills to invent new stuff.
Trades seemed like a good area until the housing crash, but maybe medicine, but not now if it gets obamaized.
The reason schoools have hyper inflation on tuition is that the loan is not dischargable in bankruptcy.
You can never escape short of death or defacto death.
Student loans should be 100% dischargable in bankruptcy after five years AND the school lose the money. This will eliminate the worthless departments that have cropped up.
Government lending is just federalizing all universities.
I’m with you. My daughter is still in high school, but no college debt for her!!
Education might just be the last bubble ‘they’ will try to keep inflated, to keep those wonderful bubbies of theirs in control of the plebs.
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