I paid $10 a semester for attending fulltime at Queens College, which was a
part of the City University of New York. I lived at home and worked part-time
for the Lighthouse Recreation program teaching guitar and autoharp and running
group singing in the children's and adult recreation programs. I earned $1.50
an hour. I managed the two years of graduate social work school because I was
sponsored by the Commission for the Blind plus I got a grant from the
University of Michigan, I think for $1,500 for each year. I didn't work while
attending graduate school. I must have been using the money I'd saved from
working plus the grant money for living expenses. I really don't remember the
details. During the first year, I lived in a graduate student cooperative. For
the first semester of the second year, I shared an apartment with two other
social work students. During the last semester, I lived alone in a studio
apartment. I also managed to pay for airplane trips home for the holidays
except for one time when I paid less for a shared car trip. And during graduate
school, my father was already very ill and dying and my mother was working
part-time as a saleswoman in a department store. Yet, the world was such, that
I did not have to go into debt. People truly have no idea how they have been
lured into a predatory system and tricked into believing that things have to be
this way.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Friday, February 26, 2021 2:47 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Student Loan Horror: When You Think You Qualify
For Debt Relief, Check Again. And Again
And furthermore...
When I was accepted at the University of Washington, my mother said to me<
"Son," she said, "Your father and I will provide your room and board as long as
you are attending school. But you must pay your tuition. Tuition, back in
1954, was a whopping $50 per quarter, for a standard 15 hours schedule. I
worked part time in a restaurant, and part time in a bowling alley, both jobs
paid $1.25 an hour. Living at home I was rolling in money. If only we had
kept wages increases at the same level as tuition, not only would our students
receiving a full education, but the future earnings of those graduates would be
injected into a more robust economy. Of course the "losers" would be those
leeches who live off the interest they suck from the veins of the students.
Carl Jarvis
On 2/26/21, Carl Jarvis <carjar82@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2/26/21, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:And furthermore...
Student Loan Horror: When You Think You Qualify For Debt Relief,Subject headings like this one simply drive me nuts. Once I finish
Check Again. And Again A pair of married science teachers were sure
they qualified for student debt forgiveness. They discovered what
many borrowers learned in the 2010s:
not
qualifying for aid is the norm
Matt Taibbi
Feb 26
The romance of Robin and Kevin sounds like the stuff of old ballads.
She was quiet and an introvert, he was the extrovert with an
elaborate social life, and on the tree-covered campus of Columbia
Community College near Sonora, California, they fell in love, while
barely young enough to drive.
"Our first date was a walk with friends through the forest behind our
dorms," recalls Kevin. "Our album to sit and listen to was Van
Morrison's Moondance. Robin was my very own Brown Eyed Girl."
"He knew my weird sense of humor that nobody else would ever get,
especially from someone who's quiet," recalls Robin, who was
seventeen when they met.
"And I'd come up with something off the wall and think, 'Okay that
didn't fly.' But it would. And it was like, 'Oh, you understand me.'"
The couple met in 1990, and married four years later. They were not
rich people. Robin's father, a contractor who'd had ups and downs
financially, died when she was young. She was raised thereafter by a
single mother who'd had to go back to school herself, and was wary of
student debt thanks to her own experiences. "She was dead set against
it," Robin remembers.
They were at least debt-free in the early years, however, getting by
with minimum-wage or seasonal jobs. Kevin worked as a ski instructor
in the winter, and as a raft guide in the summer. They made a plan to
get bachelors' degrees together at Humboldt State University.
"We moved in together," Robin remembers. "And surprise, I got pregnant."
With a child on the way, they took out a series of federal loans, in
part on the advice of Robin's mother. "She said, 'If you're going to
take out loans, make sure that it's not a private loan, but a
subsidized federal loan,'"
Robin recalls. They did so and were soon on schedule to graduate and
start the next stage after what Robin laughingly describes as their
"hippies and Humboldt" years. They were happy, having merely switched
one California vista for another.
"We spent those early years on walks in the forests of Northern
California, in Columbia," says Kevin. "Then it was through the
redwoods of Redwood Park in the Arcata Community Forest with our
newborn son, Gage."
Life however has more twists and turns than straight lines, a fact
that the current student loan system - premised upon timely
graduation and immediate gainful employment - does not anticipate.
When the young couple was just a semester away from graduation at
Humboldt, Kevin's father, who ran a small auction house in Sacramento
- "antiques, estates, and other stuff," says Robin - fell ill with
cancer. They moved, so Kevin could help maintain the family business
while his father convalesced.
He learned how to auction, but the couple still had hopes of
finishing school.
They took classes at Sacramento State, finished credits for degrees
from Humboldt, and then discovered what a lot of young people in the
eighties and nineties were learning, that the implied bargain of
college - get a degree, get a good job - was less than a concrete
proposition. "It was a wake-up call," Robin says. She remembers an
early job selling muffins.
"The muffin route that I took over, was from a beautiful woman, who
was very charismatic, bubbly, and stunning," she recalls, laughing.
"She knew her route, and gave me the list, saying, 'Do these
muffins.' I shadowed her the first day, and she sold them all!
'Okay,' I thought. 'I'll do the same thing.' I quickly found that
part of the customer attraction was seeing her.
I came back with half the muffins."
After borrowing a collective $31,000 to get Bachelor's degrees at
Humboldt, the couple realized they needed an additional qualification
to have real security. "I remember looking at a headline in a
newspaper that said, 'California teacher shortage,'" Robin remembers.
They ended up going to Cal-State Chico to get teaching certificates,
moving in with Robin's mother, who had a (very) small house.
"We actually put a tent up in her backyard," she recalls. "We
realized that we'd really hit bottom. I remember, in September of
2001, my mother came outside one morning and said, 'A plane just
crashed into the twin towers.'
I
remember that clearly because I was sitting in a tent."
At Chico State, they learned about new programs, designed to help
alleviate student debt through public service. They went through some
of the
options:
Americorps, a program called "Public Service Loan Forgiveness" for
taking public-sector jobs, and a program called "Teacher Loan
Forgiveness" that canceled up to $17,500 in debt for teachers who
taught special needs, math, or science in low-income school
districts.
The catch was, you had to work five years at a low-income "Title 1"
school
in order to qualify for the debt cancelation program. Kevin and Robin
were both science teachers. They seemed like natural fits. Then, they
made a mistake.
After graduation, they were offered jobs in, among other places,
Oakland, Los Angeles, and. Maui. All three schools were in low-income
districts.
Although Hawaii is Hawaii, its public school system has many of the
same problems as other states: the state just this past year
qualified for $56 million in federal Title 1 support. They researched
the locations and concluded, erroneously, that the Hawaii school they
were looking at was a Title 1 school. "And we thought, 'That'll
work,'" Robin recalls, and moved to the islands.
They worked for five years before finding out their error. When they
went to apply for Teacher Loan Forgiveness, they were told they were
at one of the only schools in the district that did not qualify for
Title 1, a designation that among other things pertains to schools
where "at least 75% of students qualify for free or reduced-price
meals."
Essentially, Robin and Kevin misunderstood the intricacies of Title 1
designation for the district. A school administrator explained that
an insufficient number of their high school's students took advantage
of the free lunch program.
So far, this sounds like a story that won't arouse much sympathy: a
couple chooses to live in Hawaii instead of Oakland, doesn't get firm
reassurance ahead of time that they qualify for a program, then works
ten collective years before hearing the punchline that their debts
won't be forgiven.
The
joke's on them, correct?
Not quite. The actual punchline was that even if Kevin and Robin had
chosen correctly, and gone to a bona fide Title 1 school, they likely
still wouldn't have received the benefits.
"During our time at Maui High, No Child Left Behind came into effect,"
Robin
says.
Another requirement for Title 1 benefits is that applicants be
"highly qualified." The Bush-era law changed the definition of "highly
qualified"
in
such a way that, Robin and Kevin were told, their California teaching
credentials would not have qualified them for the designation.
Stories like Kevin's and Robin's are not unusual. After programs like
Teacher Loan Forgiveness and especially Public Service Loan
Forgiveness were instituted in the late Bush years, complaints began
to trickle in that people who believed they qualified for debt
forgiveness were being disqualified by idiosyncratic fine-print
exceptions at extraordinary rates.
Was it a coincidence that these complaints began snowballing just as
the Department of Education federalized student lending in 2010?
Within just a few years after the change, the Department of Education
was making $50 billion a year in profit from student loans. Today,
the DOE has a portfolio of well over a trillion dollars in loans, and
would be roughly the fifth-largest bank in the United States, if it
were a bank.
The DOE has always had a powerful incentive to be selective in
awarding relief, particularly with the popular Public Service Loan
Forgiveness
(PSLF)
program, which had been instituted in 2007 and required ten years of
service. When that first ten years passed, how many people would get
to take advantage of the programs?
Not many, as it turned out. In July of 2019, the American Federation
of Teachers filed a lawsuit against Betsy Devos and the Department of
Education, alleging among other things that of the roughly one
million people who filled out paperwork to take advantage of the
Public Service Forgiveness Program since its inception in the late
2000s, the overwhelming majority were disqualified. The suit, citing
the Department of Education's own statistics, explained:
According to the latest available data, as of March 2019, 73,554
unique borrowers had submitted 86,006 applications for PSLF, and only
864 applications had been approved for forgiveness. Only 518
borrowers-fewer than 1% of unique borrowers submitting
applications-have had their loans forgiven.
A 99% claims rejection rate - later statistics would put the number
closer to 98% - would make even health insurance companies drool. The
lawsuit cited absurd disqualifications. One plaintiff made a required
120 payments, but was consistently told she was short the full
amount, apparently because she made some payments in a forbearance
period. In another case, the Education Department credited an
applicant with one year of employment instead of ten, then recorded
66 payments instead of 120, then rejected a claim because a form from
a servicer lacked an Employee Identification Number - and so on.
To this day, the National Student Legal Defense Network that helped
bring that lawsuit is fighting a pitched battle just to secure simple
reforms like a right to a written explanation for denials. Student
loan holders currently can't expect even this baseline minimum, as
NSLDN's president, Aaron Ament, explains.
"It's like calling a call center at Verizon," he says. "Very hard to
get an answer."
In another bizarre case from 2019, American Bar Association v.
Department of Education, student borrowers described being told
repeatedly during their initial ten-year period of public-sector
employment that they qualified for relief under the PSLF, only to be
told later on that, sorry, you don't qualify.
In one instance, a lawyer who worked for the Vietnam Veterans of
America was repeatedly told in writing that he qualified for PSLF
funds, but after making more than 30 payments, he received a letter
from his servicer saying that after "further research and after
consulting with the Department,"
the
servicer had "reversed [his] previously approved employment period,"
because
they now believed VVA "does not provide a qualifying service."
The pattern, of the Department of Education promising various relief
programs only to bounce people thanks to technicalities or outright
obstinacy, has continued through the pandemic. Last March, the
Department of Education announced that as part of its Covid-19 relief
efforts, they'd begun implementing the following programs:
"suspension of loan payments, stopped collections on defaulted loans,
and a 0% interest rate."
The "pause" was full of loopholes. In a surprising number of cases,
wages continued to be garnished in defiance of government promises,
prompting another suit. Others who felt sure they qualified for
relief discovered that they did not, thanks to an array of
technicalities. An estimated six million holders of Federal Family
Education Loans (FFELs) serviced by private carriers "will not
receive any help with their student loans at all, despite having used
a federal borrowing program," as one student advocate put it.
The FFELs in question were mostly issued before 2010, and included
Subsidized Federal Stafford Loans, Unsubsidized Federal Stafford
Loans, FFEL PLUS Loans, and Consolidated Loans. As holders of exactly
these sorts of loans from the before-time of pre-2010, Robin and
Kevin didn't qualify.
"The COVID pause on payments and interest wasn't happening on our loans,"
Robin explains. "Because we had Federal Loans, we wondered, 'Why is
this not occurring? And when we looked at it, we realized, 'Oh, no,
we've got the wrong code on our loans."
What started out as a $31,000 commitment for a Bachelor's degree
ballooned over the years, thanks in large part to interest and the
high cost of living, especially with (now) two children. The couple
insists they have never missed a payment, though they have
occasionally taken advantage of forbearance programs. As of today,
their debt sits at $126,000.
Borrowers often spend their youth fighting to get clear of the whole
debt.
As they move closer to middle age, and the balance either stays
static or moves in the wrong direction, strategies change. Instead of
trying to pay as much as possible over the long haul, they try to pay
as little as possible each month. Programs like Income-Based
Repayment incentivize people in particularly hopeless situations to
work less rather than more.
The interest payments become so ingrained that "growing old together"
becomes a promise that couples make not only to each other, but to
the implied new third member of their "Til Death Do Us Part" compact,
their non-dischargeable loans. For this reason, many borrowers can
pinpoint the exact moment when they first gave up hope of repayment.
"It was kind of a psychological thing when it tipped over from
$99,000 to $100,000," Robin says. "It became, 'We're never going to pay this
off.'"
They gave up hope, and maybe that's the point.
frothing at the mouth I'll read it. But headings like this one
should never appear in Ameerican news reportws. But could we expect
our American Coerporate Ekmpire to look at future benefits in
educating as many of our children as possible? Not among a bunch of
Plunderers who think in terms of, "Grab while the grabbing's good"!
God I hope that someday in the future of Mankind that a more equal
system replaces what we now have. We might call it "Democracy".
Carl Jarvis
