Free Republic

Disabled veterans who may not have realized they can apply to have their student loans forgiven — or who were afraid of the tax implications of claiming the benefit — will soon be getting letters in the mail inviting them to apply for tax-free loan discharges. Until recently, the IRS treated student loan forgiveness granted to disabled borrowers as taxable income. The plight of retired Army 1st. Lt. Will Milzarski, an Afghan war vet who was received a $70,000 tax bill after having $223,000 in loans forgiven, helped inspire Congress to change the law. As part of the changes to...

Rick Tallini didn't worry much about the $55,000 in federal student loans he took out for law school in the 1990s. His future seemed bright. Yet in the decades since he graduated, he's struggled to find employment and pay the bills. His original student loan balance, meanwhile, has soared to well over $300,000. "They'll tack this thing to my coffin at this point," Tallini, 61, said.

Student loan debt in America has been called a crisis. The loans many students take out to cover their education can impair them from owning houses and saving for retirement later in life. And many others can't even make their monthly payments. Some 40 percent of borrowers are expected to default on their loans by 2023. In some states, the situation is worse than others. That's the takeaway from a new project by The Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, which has mapped student loan debt across the country. Here are 10 states hit hard by student loans.

WASHINGTON—Some U.S. colleges and universities are inappropriately urging alumni to postpone payments on their student loans, causing their balances to rise while allowing the schools to skirt regulatory oversight, a government watchdog reported Thursday. The practice is one reason why some borrowers’ balances are rising and so few schools are sanctioned for leaving students in excessive debt, according to the Government Accountability Office report, released by Democrats on the House education committee. The report examines a decades-old law that assigns each college a “cohort default rate.” The law is designed to punish a college if a large share of its...

Have you ever heard the old saying that a conservative is just a liberal who got mugged? Well, I got mugged – to the tune of $60,000 a year. It’s called “tuition.” Like everyone who cons themselves into attending a liberal arts college, I was captivated by the idea of changing the world. I would immerse myself in a diverse pool of academic thought, theory, and action. Well…it didn’t quite work out that way. Over the course of four years, I was transformed from a plucky, free-thinking free spirit into a cranky, get-off-my-lawn conservative. The process started not long after...

At Everest College in Everett, nearly 30 percent of borrowers who started repaying student loans in 2014 defaulted on those loans by the end of 2016, according to the latest disclosure from the U.S. Department of Education. The data includes students at schools receiving federal student aid who entered repayment on selected federal loans in 2014 and defaulted before the end of the second fiscal year. In Colorado, 82 institutions reported 100,449 students entered repayment on student loans. And 11,204 – or 11.2 percent – defaulted on those loans.

Private lenders are pushing to break up the government’s near monopoly in the $100 billion-a-year student-loan market. The banking industry’s main lobbying group, the Consumer Bankers Association, is pressing for the government to instate caps on how much individual graduate students and parents of undergraduates can borrow from the government to cover tuition. That would force many families to turn to private lenders to cover portions of their bills. While that could mean lower interest rates for some, it could constrain funding to households with blemished credit histories. A group of investors also is lobbying for legislation to provide a...

Government in the name of order, control, efficiency, organization, the greatest good for the greatest number, solidarity, social justice, and safety is instead ruling over a society that is increasingly disordered, crime-ridden, unjust, and disturbed to an extreme. A word that describes the direction of our acceleration through space and time is anarchy. The momentum toward anarchy began with the move toward federal government expansion. During Woodrow Wilson's presidency, we began to see the implementation of what is now called the administrative state. This was helped along by our participation in WWI, which created the need for more governmental controls....

During the housing boom of the 2000s, jumbo mortgages with very large balances became a flashpoint for a brewing crisis. Now, researchers are zeroing in on a related crack but in the student debt market: very large student loans with balances exceeding $50,000. A study released Friday by the Brookings Institution finds that most borrowers who left school owing at least $50,000 in student loans in 2010 had failed to pay down any of their debt four years later. Instead, their balances had on average risen by 5% as interest accrued on their debt. As of 2014 there were about...

The GOP tax bill is providing a $1.5 trillion windfall, which will mostly be enjoyed by the rich and corporations. But what if there were another way to spend that money that could benefit more middle-income Americans while eliminating some of the country's inequalities? Look no further than getting rid of America's student debt, argue researchers at Bard College's Levy Economics Institute. They examined the potential impact of canceling the $1.4 trillion in student debt that 44 million Americans are carrying. Erasing it would be a "radical" solution to the student debt crisis, but it would pay off in bountiful...

There is indeed a student loan crisis. And the numbers show it is entirely the doing of President Obama, with an assist from his supporting cast in the Democrat-run Congress. The crisis has its origins in 2010, when President Obama essentially nationalized the national student lending program by signing a law he had proposed and Congress passed that muscled banks out of the picture as lenders. Banks had been providing government-backed student loans, but Obama, in all of his community organizer wisdom, figured distant government bureaucrats could do it better than bankers and save taxpayers money. It’s laughable, sure, but...

Editor's Note: This piece was coauthored by Ed Feulner.You can’t put a price on education, the saying goes, but if you did, it would be very high. And the cost falls on everyone. Indeed, our economy is hampered by a two-pronged higher education problem: collectively, Americans have racked up some $1.4 trillion in outstanding student loan debt. At the same time, that debt has been amassed by those who drop out before earning a degree and by those earning degrees with limited utility in the market. Yet, despite growing evidence that generous federal subsidies have driven tuition increases, policymakers continue...

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has kicked the hornets’ nest again, this time by changing the regulations for deciding if a student will be relieved of his or her obligation to repay federal college loans. The way our higher education finance system works, the federal government makes it easy for students to borrow money for college, no matter how academically weak and disengaged they might be. Many schools have been created to cash in on that money by providing educational programs (mostly with a vocational focus) for people who think they need some postsecondary education to land a job. All those...

Students are going into massive student loan debt to enrich college administrators and Wall Street bankers, even while the quality of education declines. America is now paying $10-12,000 more than Germany, France, or the UK for a year of college.

House Republicans are proposing to revamp federal student loan programs by putting caps on how much students and parents can borrow even as they call for simplifying the application process. The student aid provisions are part of a massive rewrite of higher education legislation introduced by Republican Reps. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, chair of the House Committee on Education, and Brett Guthrie of Kentucky, chairman of the panel’s higher education subcommittee. “Unfortunately, today’s chaotic maze of federal aid programs, requirements and red tape has driven up college costs and made pursuing and finishing a postsecondary education unworkable for far...

... In the next chart, we categorize student loan holders by the selectivity of the college they attended and by the major they pursued. Using Barron’s Profile of American Colleges (2001) ranking of college competitiveness, we classify four-year colleges into two categories: “selective” (colleges ranked “competitive” or above by Barron’s) and “nonselective.” In addition, we classify students into one of four fields, based on their major: “Arts and Humanities” (majors such as languages, sociology, theater), “Business and Law” (economics, legal studies, management), “STEM” (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), and “Vocational” (aviation, cosmetology, welding). In analysis not reported here, we find that...

The Trump administration is further delaying Obama-era protections for students defrauded by for-profit colleges, saying it needs more time to write new regulations. Tuesday’s announcement renewed criticism by Democrats and advocacy groups that the administration favors the interests of for-profit universities over students. The Education Department posted a notice in the Federal Register saying it wants to delay the borrower defense rule until July 1, 2019, while a new rule is being written. The department estimated that postponing the rule will save taxpayers $46 million. The regulation allows students to have their loans forgiven if their schools deceived them about...

Sounds like a good idea.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said on Monday it had ordered National Collegiate Student Loan Trusts and their debt collector, Transworld Systems, Inc to pay at least $21.6 million in penalties and restitution for illegally filing debt collection lawsuits. According to the agency, the companies allegedly sued borrowers without being able to prove the debt was owed or pursued collection on loans that were too old to sue over, and relied on false and misleading legal documents. The CFPB said the trusts had filed at least 486 lawsuits on debt where the statute of limitations for...

Twelve years after finishing Harvard’s graduate theater program, Katierose Donohue still pays almost as much in student loans each month — about $650 — as for her share of the rent in Los Angeles. She recently stopped hosting her monthly sketch comedy show, “Ma’am,” because she didn’t always break even on her $200 budget. She’s now working side jobs as a dog walker and a social media copywriter, after past gigs serving at Starbucks and handing out free cigarettes for Camel. She’s never missed a loan payment, but there’s no end in sight: She borrowed nearly $75,000 to attend the...