Student Loans

Student Loans

College costs are growing rapidly and financial aid hasn’t kept up. Close to 70 percent of undergrads graduate with debt. In 2009, the average student borrower owed $27,600.  The Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA) of 2010 ensures that all federally funded student loans will be directed through the federal government’s Direct Loan Program (DLP,) saving $61 billion and using that money to fund increased Pell Grant funding.  SAFRA abolished the Federal Education Loan Program (FFELP), which used subsidized loan companies to provide student loans. 

Cry Wolf Quotes

Here is what they haven't told us: The Education Department will borrow money at 2.8 percent from the Treasury, lend it to you at 6.8 percent and spend the difference on new programs. So you'll work longer to pay off your student loan to help pay for someone else's education -- and to help your U.S. representative's reelection.

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Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) published this anti-SAFRA op-ed in The Washington Post.

This bill is a massive expansion of the Federal Government, pure and simple.

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Alexa Marrero, spokesperson for Representative John Kline (R-MN), the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. Time magazine.

The President's plan, although touted as a means of promoting higher education, is not. The plan does not reduce the cost of student loans for a single student. Students and parents need to know that under this proposal, the government's profits on student loans borrowed by middle income students will be used to finance other student aid.

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The Consumer Bankers Association’s Director of Government Relations, Marcia Z. Sullivan. Consumer Bankers Association’s press release.

There's Washington, and then there's the rest of the country. This is the rest of the country….We don't want just any old jobs. We want our jobs.

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Albert L. Lord, Sallie Mae's CEO, Chronicle of Higher Education.

Evidence

Resources

Campus Progress is the youth wing of the Center for American Progress. They do work in both advocacy and journalism.

Higher Education Watch is the New America Foundation's blog about the politics and policy of higher education.