By Kay Steiger
Once again, student-loan season is upon us. As a new class of freshmen ships off for a hopeful first year of college or trade school, many are as busy figuring out financial arrangements as lining up classes. It wasn’t always this way, but as education has become both more costly and more necessary, many students feel they don’t have any other choice. And so they borrow $10,000, $25,000, as much as $100,000, often unaware of the unforgiving nature of the debt they’re taking on.
This year, as these students prepare to sign away their futures, they would do well to consider a report released by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). On July 20, the agency designed by Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren released “Private Student Loans,” a devastating expose of the $150 billion private student loan industry, one of the banking world’s Goliaths. The report is both an official account of private lenders’ underhanded “subprime-style” tactics as well as a sharp warning against taking out private loans that put students at risk of financial ruin.
As described in the report, the student-loan industry is a villainous enterprise, set on scamming some of the country’s most eager and vulnerable citizens. Anchored by lending giants like Sallie Mae and bolstered by some for-profit colleges that lend to their own students, it bears all the hallmarks of some of the last decade’s other most predatory industries. Much like the mortgage industry, it used cheap-credit tactics to prey on low-information borrowers, typically students of color, effectively quadrupling in size between 2001 and 2008. And like the mortgage industry, it collapsed in the recession, leaving many students drowning in debt. Today, more than $8.1 billion worth of private student loans are in default.
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