Students refuse to pay back loans to failed for-profit college

http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/student-debt-revolt-begins

by wcbeard10 • 11 years ago

77 120 11 years ago

student-debt problem is so severe that it seems to be reducing the formation of new households

Perfect! Housing bubble averted.

In all seriousness, this + an influx of foreign investment into american real estate + a future generational aversion to debt (from experiencing first or secondhand how crippling student loan debt can be) will make for some interesting times in the upcoming decades.

Shivetya• 11 years ago

the aversion to debt isn't occurring very fast considering that outstanding auto load debt is around 886 billion dollars. Credit card debt in 2014 was very similar, with an average of 7k per household.

when it comes to school debt the Federal government would be best served by limiting what it loans based on the education desired, as they set limits on what they pay out for medical services there is little reason to not do the same for education. It might even help reign in the ever increasing costs that colleges charge which in itself a property of easy loans

ChainsawSurgery9• 11 years ago

the aversion to debt isn't occurring very fast considering that outstanding auto load debt is around 886 billion dollars. Credit card debt in 2014 was very similar, with an average of 7k per household.

I can't pull up that data right now, but I remember reading (on here, no less) that most of that auto debt could be attributed to non-millenials.

Credit card debt is an excellent point, though I'm not sure how meaningful per household is in this context (part of the article is pointing out that a decent portion of millenials aren't forming their own households).

Remember that the oldest millenials are still in their early-mid thirties.

Federal government would be best served

Ah, but there's the rub - a decent amount of this debt is private.

mikeash3• 11 years ago

$886 billion in auto loans doesn't seem like very much to me. There are about 254 million passenger vehicles in the US, so that's an average of $3,500 in debt per car (of course there will be huge variation there).

You pretty much need a car to live in many places in this country, and in many more places you need a car to have a decent job. Most people can't afford to buy one outright, and in a case like that, it's sensible to take out a loan in order to purchase an asset that allows you to immediately start making money to pay it off. Taking out a loan for a low-end car so you can drive to work is pretty different from taking out $50,000 in loans for a degree that you hope will let you find better work years in the future.

eat• 11 years ago

I always hear people say things like "we don't have debtors prisons in the U.S.". If enough people start doing this, I have a very strong feeling that that will change. As student loans become more of a crisis, we're sure to see more people simply deciding not to pay. What recourse to lenders have if this happens on a large scale?

krschultz• 11 years ago

They can start garnishing your wages, so unless you never want to hold a job again, creditors will get their money.

jschwartzi• 11 years ago

With Federal loans they can also just take payment directly from your tax returns.

Zigurd4• 11 years ago

You can leave the country. Most of the people deeply in debt with degrees or training that won't pay the debt would find, for example, teaching English in China a relatively comfortable living. If you have the imagination to look beyond Europe, finding a gig that's better than debt slavery isn't too difficult.

toomuchtodo6• 11 years ago

Its almost impossible in Florida for a creditor to garnish your wages, as you have to agree to it.

Florida law does provide an exemption which is specific to wage garnishments. This exemption is not automatic and must be claimed by filing an affidavit with the Court when you are notified that the creditor intends to request a wage garnishment. If you properly claim the exemption, your wages cannot be garnished by a judgment creditor if you are head of the family and your wages are $750 per week or less. If you are a head of family and your wages exceed $750 per week, they can only be garnished by a judgment creditor if you have agreed in writing that the creditor can garnish your wages. To qualify as head of family, you must provide more than one half of the support for a child or other dependant.

mjburgess• 11 years ago

A debtor's prison isn't much use to creditors.

whafro4• 11 years ago

For an isolated case, that's true. But in the aggregate, as a tool to get debtors to avoid default, that may be a different story.

kcole16• 11 years ago

We don't have debtors prison because it doesn't make any sense as a means of recourse.

If debtors stop paying, lendors will stop lending.

freehunter• 11 years ago

Exactly. If you're free, they can garnish your wages, no matter how small. If you're in prison, you can't make any money. Creditors would rather have even a 1% return than nothing at all, so why would they put you in prison?

Someone1234• 11 years ago

The US continues to jail people for failing to pay fines, child support, and similar. So there is in one sense still debtors prison, but it really only applies to debts owed in certain situations.

mikeash3• 11 years ago

They wouldn't have a lot of recourse, I imagine. Perhaps this will teach lenders to be more careful about unsecured loans.

VLM• 11 years ago

“In some cases, you may assert, as a defense against collection of your loan, that the school did something wrong or failed to do something that it should have done.”

Wait till the law students and education students figure out that their schools intentionally overproduced about twice as many grads as the market can bear. And the PHD students and the ... well, basically every program in every school in the country except the ivy league CS programs.

Its either debt jubilee time or admit the "higher ed magically provides a great job" was all a scam. When it comes to deciding between saving face and saving a buck, usually we save a buck, so I almost guarantee the proposed strategy will fail. So culturally we will momentarily see the death of "higher ed at all costs" as a gateway to a great job and all that propaganda.

vinceguidry7• 11 years ago

It's a bit disingenuous to claim that you shouldn't pay back any of the debt incurred in earning your degree because the educational program was worthless when you're still seeking a career in the field requiring that degree.

I agree she shouldn't have to pay all of the debt, but surely the degree isn't totally worthless.

mattmanser• 11 years ago

She got ripped off by a school, so should now give up her dreams of becoming a nurse.

Great argument.

vinceguidry7• 11 years ago

No, she should start a career in whatever field she's best positioned to start one in. Oh is that nursing? I wonder why.

whafro4• 11 years ago

Only if the degree is the sole factor in getting the career she desired.

If that's the case, I can send you a degree from WhafroU via PDF for a tidy sum within an hour. Get in touch, folks!

vinceguidry7• 11 years ago

You absolutely should start selling paper degrees if your 'students' can actually get jobs with them, as the person in the article was able to.

I don't think people really understand what they're saying when they say that people shouldn't have to pay back these loans. The loans are going to get repayed, it's just a question of who. You can't take it out of the defunct college, those people, and that money, are gone. Basically you're saying that taxpayers should foot the bill. You want to pay the government back out of your own pocket? Because that's what this means.

Zigurd4• 11 years ago

"...because the educational program was worthless when you're still seeking a career in the field requiring that degree"

That doesn't follow at all. The program could have been deficient. The placement program could have been fraudulent. And yet the student could make up the deficiency with other training and compete, as hopeless as that might be, against others in the same boat.

It isn't unusual for schools to defraud students by gaming placement by, for example, providing a pitiful amount of seed money for business majors to set off in a leaky lifeboat, or by forcing law students in lower-tier law schools to drop out before graduating.

You also have to consider that debt repayment in constant payments pays down very little principle at first. A student may have paid a lot of interest, but their debt remains high.

vinceguidry7• 11 years ago

So what is the solution here? Make taxpayers foot the bill for the social costs incurred by awful colleges? Once you make that decision, then the line drawn in the sand about what an 'awful college' is and which costs the colleges and students alike can expect taxpayers to be liable for is going to shift over time. You're trading one enormous problem for another one.

She should have known that for-profit colleges are bullshit before signing her life away to one. Now she wants to have her cake and eat it too by refusing to pay her loans, while still deriving benefit from the supposedly worthless degree she got.

We need a better solution to higher education. But this isn't it. I'm glad she's raising awareness of this issue, but she and everyone else involved needs to pay back at least some of her loan. You can't just expect the government to absolve you of your bad decisions.

Alex39173• 11 years ago

So basically students enroll in a scam college to trick people into thinking they are well educated, and then complain when the scam is revealed.

What's next, people who scam money from the elderly by pretending to be their grandchildren sue after only getting 25 cents with their birthday cards?

I realize these colleges are also using high pressure sales tactics to trick vulnerable populations into enrolling and then extorting them for money, but at some point people still need to take responsibility for their actions.

TomGullen• 11 years ago

You said it yourself, they were preying on the vulnerable. To what extent exactly should these vulnerable people take personal responsibility?

Why didn't you mention that these colleges need to take some responsibility as well?

Alex39173• 11 years ago

To what extent exactly should these vulnerable people take personal responsibility?

I mean once they showed up and realized it wasn't a real college and they weren't being taught anything, that would have been the appropriate time to protest and try to get their money back, rather than staying for another 2-4 years to get the degree and hoping that no one notices that they didn't actually learn anything.

Why didn't you mention that these colleges need to take some responsibility as well?

They should, but in this case they already got shut down. My feelings about for-profit colleges are basically the same as my feelings on the military. I.e. the military shouldn't be tricking kids into enlisting, but that that still doesn't give soldiers a free pass for going over to the middle east and killing innocent people.

ls66• 11 years ago

I think anyone who is capable of graduating from a college, even a flawed one, as she did, has a hard time portraying themselves as vulnerable. At what point is someone responsible. She even graduated, so she has a degree and can legally state that. While I'm happy to see educational institutions being viewed with more skepticism as to their value, I think her situation is pretty cut and dried. Many of us had the experience of getting out of college and for a number of reasons, like the economy, not being able to find a job in the field and having to find another way.

Mvandenbergh• 11 years ago

So basically students enroll in a scam college to trick people into thinking they are well educated, and then complain when the scam is revealed.

I don't think so. There are colleges (mostly online and often postgraduate only) where the 'student' is in on the scam. They mostly serve markets where promotion or pay prospects are tied to box ticking possession of a masters or PhD with no real consideration of the academic rank of the programs. Those really are about trying to trick people into thinking they are well educated - although you could argue that if no-one cares about the quality of the 'degrees' they're not really scamming anyone.

What Corinthian was doing was charging large sums of money to students for nearly worthless, marginally accredited or unaccredited education while telling them that they were receiving valuable, career enhancing education and recognised credentials. They were the marks and not in on the con.

Of course I absolutely agree that people need to take responsibility for their actions but we need to consider the context and determine what is a reasonable amount of due diligence to undertake.

First of all, our society relentlessly pounds the message into people's heads that they need to go to college to succeed in life. Think of how often an 18 year old will have been told of the importance of going to college by teachers, counsellors, and other authority figures in their lives (all of whom have themselves been to college). How often their parents (who usually will not have been) will tell them that this is what they need to do to succeed. How often the media portrays going to college as the right thing to do. In every sitcom set in a high school or with high school aged main characters, applying to and getting into college is eventually a major plot point.

Now compare that with how often those same sources mention the difference between applying to a community college, a state college, a private non-profit, and a private for-profit college. If they even know the difference (which parents who haven't been will almost certainly not).

Think about the government services which poor people tend to interact with, and the American attitude towards public provision and realise that the educational superiority of publicly owned community colleges over privately owned colleges is actually anomalous. (and in fact the most prestigious American colleges are private, just a different kind of private). How on Earth is a teenager supposed to figure that out.

Should we expect an 18 year old to understand that regional accreditation is better than national accreditation? I mean, does that actually even make sense?

So while I agree that there is a case for people taking responsibility for their actions, I think that young people doing what society told them to do and making some poor decisions after being lied to have met the test for contextually reasonable due diligence.

Alex39173• 11 years ago

I think that's a reasonable argument, although I would point out that being marks and being in on the con are not mutually exclusive.

AndrewKemendo2• 11 years ago

Is this the start of the student-loan bubble bursting?

From what I have read student loan debt, despite it's size, doesn't threaten the rest of the economy in the same way that housing loans did. Hopefully that is the case.

whafro4• 11 years ago

Yeah, there's no risk of someone repossessing the education you received, like there is of the house you've defaulted on. And a reduction in the value of a bachelor's degree doesn't affect your family's net worth like that same reduction in the value of your home.

Mass defaults (which you could argue we're already seeing at ~20%) would be terrible for lenders (private and public), and probably the schools involved, so there'd be an impact, but you wouldn't have the massive loss of aggregate wealth we saw impacting the middle class five to ten years ago.

cafard2• 11 years ago

If your bachelor's degree is from a for-profit college that has just gone out of business, what is its value?

ChainsawSurgery9• 11 years ago

doesn't threaten the rest of the economy in the same way that housing loans did

I dunno about that - it's probably just a lot more insidious and less panic-y.

Adults repaying student loans aren't spending that money on other things. If you're paying $300 a month to Sallie Mae, that's $300 you're not spending on:

1) Savings/retirement/etc

2) Goods and services

3) Capital investment

4) Etc.

Given the compounding nature of some of these things, and the fact that these payments constitute a higher % of your income early on (assuming steady career progression), it's a problem that may just slowly unravel as time goes on.

Don't forget we live in a service economy - adults not spending money on a diverse set of services (as opposed to say, just student loan services) will hurt us in the long run.

cjslep• 11 years ago

$300 a month seems low. I went to North Carolina State University, generally regarded as a cheaper school (compared to neighboring UNC Chapel Hill or Duke) for a solid quality engineering education as an in-state student. I graduated after four years in 2013 and my monthly payment to Navient (formerly Sallie Mae) is easily triple that.

iopq3• 11 years ago

Yes, but when going to college a lot of college employees got paid using that money. Current students paying money to the college is stimulating the economy, while former students paying the debt off is shrinking the economy.

ssharp• 11 years ago

We financed almost all of my wife's law school and decided once she graduated and had a job, that we'd pay off her loans as quickly as possible. We're almost done, but it's been two long years of getting by on one paycheck. That, along with having twins, means that we're not spending money like we did in our DINK days.

However, the extra financial discipline has been very beneficial. We've learned to coupon a lot of stuff for next to nothing, redid our retirement savings, set up savings for the babies, and have put together a financial roadmap for the next few years. I'm sure having the kids had a lot to do with it, but cutting your net income in almost half makes you reconsider a lot of things.

Doing things this way will save over $150,000 in interest over the next 30 years. The government will gladly hand you a 30-year refinancing of your loans, with an attractive monthly rate, but the amount of interest that you end up paying is staggering. I know most people graduating aren't in the same position we were in to aggressively pay down the debt and those who can't are starting out life in a financial pit.

Seeing that type of amortization and interest on anything other than a house (and even then...) is pretty eye opening, especially when the amortization schedule has your name on it!

AndrewKemendo2• 11 years ago

My question was, what is the macro impact of them defaulting on student loans.

Seems like based on your point, everyone would be better off because PPP would go up slightly. I'm not sure I agree, but only because I am not sure of the impact massive student loan default would have on capital markets for debt holders.

Basically would mean that Sallie Mae could tank significantly.

sheepdestroyer2• 11 years ago

A lot of countries have a free post secondary education system : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_education#Partial_list_of...

It always astonish me to think it can be seen as normal, even more equitable, to require people to get so huge debts before even being trained to work.

iopq3• 11 years ago

To pay for someone's education someone else must be taxed. Why is it better to tax a working person for every student's education instead of just having that person pay for the exact education they received?

redblacktree• 11 years ago

Because we all benefit by living in a well-educated society. It's the same argument with public schools at lower levels. Would you advocate that these also be made exclusively private?

sheepdestroyer2• 11 years ago

Because taxing is low on low incomes while high on high incomes. And that you do not know before starting to work which king of income, if any, you will have. that's the big equity advantage of redistribution.

DasIch• 11 years ago

People with university education tend to have higher incomes and in countries with sane laws therefore pay more in taxes. On average they will pay more than they get from government.

Apart from that I feel much more comfortable going to a doctor, knowing that she has gained that position by skill and not because her parents could afford it.

jackmaney2• 11 years ago

To pay for infrastructure repairs someone else must be taxed. Why is it better to tax a working person in order to repair roads instead of just having drivers pay for the proportion of roads that they use?

bkeroack• 11 years ago

A sensible system would be one like Brazil's (and possibly other countries): free education at public universities for those who qualify on the stringent entrance exams along with a system of private universities for those who don't make it and can pay for it.

This would allow all deserving students a high quality, free education while limiting the amount of waste and degree inflation that would result from a completely free university system.

bdcravens3• 11 years ago

The political culture in the United States would attack that system as being unfair to the poor and minorities that ostensibly received a lesser education than their middle- and upper-class cohorts.

restalis2• 11 years ago

The USA's education system of student debt is also addressing another important problem - quality leakage to a foreign country. Think about it, Brazil (or any other country with a similar system) invests heavily in training its bright people for free, and afterwards it just looses them to some high bid foreign employer and the country's education investment gets counted as waste. USA on the other hand, puts the yoke on its promising younglings early on, so regardless of the outcome, the country gets a profit out of them (and in a capitalist frame of thought that's what does mater the most). Clever, isn't it?

dragonwriter2• 11 years ago

A sensible system would be one like Brazil's (and possibly other countries): free education at public universities for those who qualify on the stringent entrance exams along with a system of private universities for those who don't make it and can pay for it.

California used to have a multitier system of tuition-free higher-education (two tiers of tuition-free public university, both selective but one moreso than the other, plus the community college system) along with private universities, so it worked somewhat like that, but that eroded over time.

elros• 11 years ago

With the caveat that public elementary education in Brazil is very bad, so the people who are able to qualify on those exams are the people who come from families who could afford private schools at the elementary level.

So in essence, it's a system that's geared towards keeping the rich educated and the poor uneducated, by using a slight Catch-22.

Of course YMMV, and it often does, Brazil is huge and there are exceptions, but what I've laid out is what most commonly happens.

In the past few years though, the Government has built programs whose goal is to increase the amount of poor people who get educated, either by subsidizing the cost with tax money in private universities (Gasp! Socialism! :P) or by affirmative action with a quota system in public universities.

This brings about worries of its own, such as "Will people who are granted access to well-ranked Universities based primarily on their low income be able to actually follow through with the course?", for example, but overall the situation is an improvement.

cpursley• 11 years ago

Agreed, where does our tax money go? It seems that other nations despite their level or method of taxation are able to provide for free to subsidized secondary education to their citizens.

nedwin2• 11 years ago

You spend the highest percentage of your budget on the military. That's where it goes.

yodsanklai2• 11 years ago

Good question. My random guess would be that it goes into wars. Defense represents about 17% of the federal tax money. I don't know how it compares with other countries though, and whether or not it's a money leak or profitable in the long run.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_S...

jgrowl• 11 years ago

I live in the US and was able to go to college almost for free. There were a few caveats though:

1. I waited until I was 24. This meant that my parents income did not affect my federal assistance so that I could get the maximum amount.

2. I went to a dirt cheap community college my first two years. It was so cheap that the federal grants covered my tuition, books, plus a little extra for living expenses.

3. I did really well at community college and was able to get a few scholarships at a bigger university.

4. In my state there is a block transfer program so that all of my credits at community college counted at the larger university.

5. I was able to live at home for the entire duration so I did not have to pay a huge sum for campus housing.

I was able to get a computer science degree from a state university with somewhere around $1000 in debt which I paid off entirely with my first paycheck.

I was only in $1000 in debt because I foolishly bought a $2400 gaming laptop.

33W• 11 years ago

Isn't there a conflict between points 1 and 5? Claiming to be an independent student while living at home?

lectrick• 11 years ago

I was able to live at home for the entire duration so I did not have to pay a huge sum for campus housing.

While this might make financial sense at first, living in the dorms was one of (if not THE) best social experiences of my life, and in my opinion, worth the cost. I still have numerous friends and acquaintances I made via the dorms, going on 20 years later. In a few cases they have paid off socially and business-wise.

I would not recommend cutting out the singular "dorm experience" for the sake of saving a few bucks you can make back later anyway.

jobu• 11 years ago

It's odd that they don't mention the reason Corinthian is shutting down so many colleges - http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2014/07/08/329550897/the-collaps...

A relative of mine works there and said they were about to be sued by the Department of Education over fraud in their student loan department. The settlement forced the company to sell or close all of it's colleges and no senior management or administrative staff is allowed to stay with any of the colleges.

It seems pretty clear that Corinthian did some bad things, and it's likely the clause the article mentions in federal loans might give _some_ students an way out of debt:

“In some cases, you may assert, as a defense against collection of your loan, that the school did something wrong or failed to do something that it should have done.”

IANAL, but I think it's pretty unlikely the government would let all of the students off the hook. (For a billion dollars!)

jessaustin3• 11 years ago

...pretty unlikely...

Eh, it's not "real" money. Students will have debts forgiven when it's politically expedient to do so.

crazy1van• 11 years ago

Eh, it's not "real" money

Why not? It was real to the tax payers who paid it to the government and real to the Corinthian employees who were paid by the school and it will be real to the students as they struggle to pay it back over many years.

simonh• 11 years ago

I don't think it's up to 'the government', it's up to the courts. It seems pretty clear to me that the school should have educated the students, and didn't. Hopefully the courts will see it that way as well.

Yes, I know that means the taxpayer footing the bill. The government was responsible for accrediting, regulating and auditing the colleges. The government, and collectively the people, are responsible for any failures in that duty and any individual citizens harmed as a result deserve compensation.

Note I'm not a US citizen, so my comments are meant in general.

littletimmy• 11 years ago

Good.

This bubble has to burst. The college education system in this country has gone completely insane. The cost of a year's worth of education is now $60000, when the cost for comparable universities in the UK is $10000 and in Germany is $0. Just make community college + state universities free for everyone to attend, and we should have no more problem with this debt nonsense anymore.

maratd• 11 years ago

Just make community college + state universities free for everyone to attend, and we should have no more problem with this debt nonsense anymore.

Public colleges are already substantially less than private institutions. I doubt subsidizing them further will have a substantial impact on private tuition.

If we stop lending money to pay for education, the colleges will see substantially reduced demand at their inflated price levels and will quickly cut prices to adjust.

Then again, they might not.

They currently segregate their customers into groups by way of "scholarships" and essentially extract the maximum amount of money they can possibly get. I can't think of another industry where such disgusting behavior is tolerated or even celebrated as generosity.

TeMPOraL• 11 years ago

Isn't this the same college John Oliver criticized recently for their "quality education"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8pjd1QEA0c#t=562

"We went to the museum of Scientology for our psychiatric rotation"...

discardorama• 11 years ago

"Most Corinthian students cover their tuition by taking out federal and private loans. That debt, it turns out, is far more resilient than Corinthian itself."

This here is the problem. If Corinthian can get out from paying its debts, why can't the students?

rcarrigan87• 11 years ago

Mark Cuban wrote a great post about when colleges start going out of business.

As a college grad with a lot of debt I advise everyone to avoid student loans at all costs. It's not worth it and there are always alternatives.

http://blogmaverick.com/2013/01/26/will-your-college-go-out-...

skizm2• 11 years ago

Did the students get a loan from the college or a bank? Did the bank fail? Can I refuse to pay back my mortgage if my house burns down?

bdcravens3• 11 years ago

There's insurance on your house. Perhaps the same should happen with eduction.

skizm2• 11 years ago

My point is just because the thing you bought with your loan money is now useless/worthless doesn't relieve you of your obligation to the bank.

bko• 11 years ago

I think the reason many students put up with increased costs is because they have access to subsidized loans, mainly from the government. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau estimates that out of the $1.2 trillion in debt, $1 trillion are estimated to be guaranteed or held by the federal government [0]

I may be in the minority opinion, but I think college is still pretty affordable.

In 2014-15, average published tuition and fee prices for in-state students at public four-year institutions range from $4,646 in Wyoming and $6,138 in Alaska to $14,419 in Vermont and $14,712 in New Hampshire. [1]

CUNY for instance is $6,030 a year [2]

The tuition is higher than it has been in the past but attending college is a lot more profitable as well. I know the state school I had attended has raised tuition over the years, but I can't help but look around and think that all the money went into a new stadium ($33 MM), new athletic gym and new (very impressive) dorms.

The average student attending an expensive for-profit (less credible) college isn't the same person as someone attending a good state school. A lot of time these colleges attract more marginal students. The payoff for most colleges is still very high and worth the cost. But there should be some cost as to discourage less productive ventures and to have some skin in the game for the student.

[0] http://www.consumerfinance.gov/newsroom/student-debt-swells-... [1] http://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-table... [2] http://www.cuny.edu/admissions/tuition-fees.html

remarkEon• 11 years ago

I really can't stress enough how these for-profit institutions seek to avoid any kind of responsibility otherwise assumed of an institution of higher learning. They consistently take advantage of veterans. Close to home, these companies actively and willfully take advantage of veterans benefits to reap in billions [0]. These schools actively recruit soldiers at military bases, who end up using up a good portion (or all) of their benefit without being able to get a job or before they can transfer it to their children or spouse. They're left with no education benefit, a degree that isn't transferable and, perhaps worst of all, a feeling of failure and embarrassment. PBS did an excellent show on the situation not long ago [1]. The standard argument I hear in favor of these schools is that the situation in the military is different, and a lot of veterans leaving the force already have families so going to a traditional college or university would be difficult or unmanageable. This is true, but distance learning has to become better.

[0] http://fortune.com/2014/11/11/gi-bill-for-profit-colleges/ [1] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/gi-bill-benefitting-profit-co...

awesome_work_2• 11 years ago

I think the most important piece of information to come out of this article is "More than a fifth of borrowers of federal student loans go into default, but people who default tend not to announce their status publicly."

This, to me, seems extremely high. Does anyone know what the default rate is on other types of loans?

Students refuse to pay back loans to failed for-profit college

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