Like a repentant boozer who promises to give up drinking, the Department of Education pledged to modernize its neanderthal student loan program. Unfortunately, like a chronic drunk, DOE simply can’t clean up its act. DOE’s own Inspector General audited the Department’s modernization efforts and issued a report last week. The audit concluded that DOE bungled its modernization …
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines snafu as “a situation marked by errors or confusion.” The word is an acronym for “Situation Normal, All Fouled (or Fucked) Up.” Earlier this month, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued a report confirming what we already knew: the federal student program is all f-cked up. Unfortunately, the CFPB’s publication is titled Supervisory Highlights …
A number of states have filed an amended complaint against the Department of Education and Elisabeth DeVos over the handling of the Borrower Defense to Repayment Program gutted by the Trump administration. The allegations made by a number of states is that the Trump Department of Education has changed the rules about student loan forgiveness …
I lived in Houston when Hurricane Rita hit the Gulf Coast in 2005. Weather forecasters predicted that Rita would make landfall in Galveston Bay and that Galveston and towns south of Houston would suffer massive flooding and wind damage. The hurricane predictors also warned that parts of Houston would flood. Responding to these warnings, hundreds …
An outside contractor was hired at the Department of Education to try to get to the bottom of the happiness problem. – “I feel encouraged to come up with new and better ways of doing things.” About 20 percent of employees at the Department of Education (ED) agree in 2018 compared to 26 percent in …
I don’t know how much more bizarre and anti-consumer the Department of Education under Betsy DeVos can get. It has been horrible to watch Education end programs, drag their feet dealing with students who are the victims of fraud by schools, not holding student loan servicers accountable for good advice, and the list goes on. …
North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein yesterday called on the U.S. Department of Education to honor its “historic law enforcement partnerships” by reinstating the long-standing practice of disclosing student loan information to law enforcement agencies – a practice it curtailed without explanation last month. In a letter sent last Friday to U.S. Education Secretary Betsy …
Distressed debtors cannot discharge student loans unless they can show their loans constitute an “undue hardship” to themselves and their dependents. Congress did not define undue hardship in the Bankruptcy Code, so it was left to the courts to define the term. Most courts have adopted the Brunner test for determining when a student loan …
Barbara Erkson, an unmarried 64-year-old woman, filed an adversary proceeding in a Maine bankruptcy court in an attempt to discharge $107,000 in student loans in bankruptcy. The U.S. Department of Education and Educational Credit Management Corporation (ECMC) vigorously objected, but Judge Peter Carey rejected their heartless arguments and granted Ms. Erkson a full discharge. This …
In this previous post I talked about the new Department of Education policy to no longer issue full forgiveness on student loans for students which had been clearly screwed over. In their unbridled dystopian view of how to handle victims, the Department of Education decided only partial forgiveness may be available for students who attended …