Student Loan Blog : CNN

College Student Finance Guru Blogs His Way to Book Deal

Student Loan Girl — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:04:00 GMT

Zac Bissonnette is living the blogger’s dream, getting paid to write for TheDailyBeast.com and AOL’s WalletPop.com, and now landing a book deal that may be just the ticket for helping him weather a dismal job market in one of the worst recessions in history (“Student Morphs Blog Into Book Deal,” Amherst Bulletin, Jan. 2, 2009).

Publishers Weekly recently announced that Bissonnette, a sophomore majoring in legal studies at the University of Massachusetts, is busy drafting a book for Portfolio, a publishing subsidiary of the Penguin Group, that will chronicle how parents and their children pay for college.

Scheduled for publication in 2010, the same year Bissonnette will graduate, the book will compare the value of a public versus a private college education, and, as Bissonnette explains, will critically examine what happens when students take on too much debt from student loans.

Bissonnette, who is paying his own way through college, says he began blogging in high school from a library computer.

Since then, his personal interest in finances has spiraled into a successful side business; after his blogs were picked up by WalletPop, for which he is now an editor, and The Daily Beast, he was featured on CNN’s “American Morning” for an editorial he wrote concerning President-elect Barack Obama’s economic policy and its effect on student loans.

He got his book deal shortly after his November CNN appearance. Bissonnette said, “I came up with this idea, got an agent, and he put this together.”

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Wachovia Suspends Its Undergraduate Private Student Loan Program

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 00:41:00 GMT

After posting an $8.9 billion second-quarter loss in July, Wachovia Corp. announced on Tuesday that it would stop making private student loans to undergraduates (“Wachovia to Stop Writing Private Undergrad Student Loans,” CNN Money, Aug. 5, 2008).

Wachovia representative Ferris Morrison said the company’s student loan lending subsidiary, Wachovia Education Finance Inc., will continue to offer federal student loans, as well as private loans for graduate and professional education students. However, as of August 5, Wachovia is no longer accepting applications for private student loans for undergraduates.

“At this time, we felt it was prudent,” Morrison said.

Wachovia Education Finance, the sixth-largest provider of student loans, sent a letter to its borrowers on Tuesday informing them of the change, citing “the current overall financial industry environment,” reported Inside Higher Ed (“Quick Takes: Wachovia Abandons Private Student Loans,” Aug. 6, 2008).

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Top-Rated Colleges Drop SAT Requirement for Admissions Applicants

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 23:27:00 GMT

Smith College in Massachusetts and Wake Forest University in North Carolina recently joined the nearly 30 percent of all 760 four-year colleges and universities in the country that no longer require the submission of SAT or other standardized test scores as a condition for admission, according to an article on CNN.com (“More Colleges Move Toward Optional SATs,” May 30, 2008).

Although many other institutions have previously gone SAT and ACT-optional, Smith and Wake Forest are the first top-30 schools on U.S. News & World Report’s Top Liberal Arts Colleges list and Top National Universities list, respectively, to drop the requirement. Smith College ranked 17^th on 2008’s top liberal arts colleges list and Wake Forest came in 30^th out of the nation’s top universities.

"We in admissions have put up a barrier to these students to say all of your hard work and all of your academic achievement is being negated by one test, and we don't feel like that is fair," said Martha Allman, Wake Forest’s director of admissions, in the Chicago Tribune (“University to Drop Required ACT, SAT,” May 27, 2008).

Under the new policy, Wake Forest will still allow applicants to submit SAT and ACT scores if they choose, but will start placing more emphasis on personal interviews, academics, and extracurricular activities.

College consultant Jack Maguire, founder of Maguire Associates, believes that schools which become test-optional, like Wake Forest, focus their admissions decisions on what’s really important.

"I do think it improves a school's image," he said. "It shows… they're really interested in increasing diversity."

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Library Book Past Due: Loan Denied

Student Loan Girl — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 23:00:00 GMT

Chances are you have overdue library books laying around in your dorm room or apartment. Maybe the book you checked out six months ago has become a part of your décor—a handy paperweight on your desk or an unconventional coaster on your coffee table.

You’ve thought to yourself, no biggie, right? Not quite. You might want to dust off the CD’s, DVD’s and other library materials you have and drop them off. Return them before the fines you’ve racked up get turned over to a collection agency.

Turns out, more and more libraries think their missing property and your laid-back attitude about it are quite a big deal. And they’re hitting you where it hurts the most, your wallet.

If you’re not careful that overdue book could prevent you from getting a loan for a car or a house.

Libraries Collecting on Overdue Fines with Big Help

Many libraries have teamed up with Unique Management Services, Inc., a collection agency that specializes in recovering library books and late fees.

The company based in Jeffersonville, Indiana, tracks down late accounts for more than 850 clients (libraries of all sizes) in the United States, England, Canada and Australia. Its goal is to shock library abusers—most of whom are average, well-meaning people—into action, Kenes Bowling, the company’s manager for customer development, tells The New York Times.

The debt collector’s website states it send letters that gently nudge people into returning items that rightfully belong to the library and the people it serves.

New York Times reporters Anne Barnard and Jo Craven McGinty write that included in one of the company’s standard letters is language like: “Once reported, this adverse information can stay on your record for seven years!” The letter goes on to warn that car dealers, department stores and banks may learn of the library users’ misdeeds. “Why allow this to happen?”

The company typically sends out two letters and follows up with a phone call to your home. It claims phone calls improve results as much as 30 percent over letters alone.

The Moral: Be a Good Patron

With such verbiage, it’s hard not to see that your local library means business.

It’s not that libraries want to be seen as bullies. But when you consider that in a little over a decade, Unique Management Services has managed to retrieve $5.8 million for the New York Public Library System alone, you can see why libraries are turning to debt collection agencies like UMS for help.

Libraries want to penalize people who believe items can be checked out to infinity and beyond and those who simply want to sell them or keep items for their personal collections.

If you’re reported for owing a library fine, you could see your credit rating drop by 100 points or more, Craig Watts a spokesperson for Fair Isaac, the company that scores your credit history, tells CNN.com.

So don’t wait to be tattled on. Just take your library items back and pay up before you pay too much.

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Gone in a Puff of Smoke: College Campuses Cutting Out Smoking

Student Loan Girl — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 07:31:00 GMT

To smoke or not to smoke? That isn’t so much the question anymore as, Where art thou, Legally Sanctioned Smoking Area? And the answer to that is harder and harder to find as the number of smoking bans increases across both the country and college campuses.

According to the American Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation, as of October 1, 2007, there are 95 colleges and universities nationwide with campus-wide smoke-free policies, and almost another 300 with partial bans that prohibit smoking in all residential housing (“U.S. Colleges and Universities With Smokefree Air Policies,” Oct. 1, 2007).

The most recent additions to the list include schools in New Jersey, Indiana, and Georgia, and with this November 15^th representing the 31^st anniversary of the national Great American Smokeout, the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network is pushing for more schools to follow suit, reports Judy Fortin for CNN (“Smoke-Free College Trend Growing,” Nov. 12, 2007).

A Battle Against Statistics

Smoking rates in the United States are highest among college-age students, Fortin notes, with college students smoking more even as all other age groups cut down on their tobacco use. But anti-smoking students, administrators, and other advocates continue to push for their cause.

“Students form lifelong habits in college, so reducing their exposure to cigarettes may have a lasting effect,” writes Emily Bazar for USA Today, quoting Besty Foy of the American College Health Association (“More Colleges Banning Smoking,” March 1, 2007).

“If you’re not allowed to smoke on campus, if you can’t buy tobacco products on campus, it will definitely deter some students from smoking,” says Foy.

The Non-Smoking Campus: Healthier But Less Safe?

Advocates for campus smoking bans argue that the average student and especially those students plagued with asthma or other chronic lung problems have the right to a healthful environment at school.

When a campus is smoke-free, “it’s just a healthier place to be,” says Martha Nesbitt, president of Georgia’s Gainesville State College, in Fortin’s article. Gainesville State is in its fourth year of a campus-wide ban on all tobacco products.

“As you go in a building,” says Nesbitt, “you’re not going to have to go through smoke. When you walk out, you don’t see cigarette butts littered around. It’s just a cleaner, healthier campus.”

For college smokers, on the other hand—and according to the 2006 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, that’s 28.4 percent of full-time college students and 43.5 percent of part-time students—school smoking bans don’t just raise an issue of infringement on personal freedom, they could compromise student safety on campus.

New Jersey’s Bergen Community College, which was scheduled to pass its proposed campus-wide smoking ban last month, has a 167-acre campus, meaning students may have quite a long walk for a smoke break.

Michael McFadden, a smokers’ rights advocate in the area, says the proposed ban would create safety issues for the school’s students, forcing them off campus.

“It can put the student in a dangerous situation,” says McFadden, in an article by Patricia Alex in Drexel University’s The Triangle. In McFadden’s view, Alex writes, “the bans amount to social engineering that is more Orwellian than American” (“New Jersey College Passes Campus Wide Smoking Ban,” Oct. 19, 2007).

Student smokers who live on campus find the bans to be particularly unfair, considering these injunctions prohibit them from exercising a personal choice within or near their own residence.

“I can vote for president of the United States. I can go to war,” says Alex Eukmer, a student at Indiana University in Bloomington, in Bazar’s USA Today article. “But I can’t necessarily smoke a cigarette because they’re afraid I’ll make a bad choice?”

But for a growing number of college administrators, it’s not a question of good or bad student choices, but of the choice the school itself wants to make when it comes to smoking.

“We want our institution to make a statement about doing the right things when it comes to good health,” says Chuck Kupchella, president of the University of North Dakota, in Bazar’s article. He sums up the nationwide college smoking debate bluntly: “Smokers still will have rights, but just not on our campus.”

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Say Goodbye to Town Hall and Hello to the World of E-Mediacy

Student Loan Girl — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 18:37:00 GMT

First, there was Cindy Sheehan, the suburban mother turned political activist after her son died in Iraq.

Then there was the CNN and YouTube joint foray into the presidential debates, with CNN televising all eight Democratic candidates debating questions submitted by the public through YouTube videos.

And now get ready for the first-ever webcast of a presidential town hall discussion, brought to you by MTV and MySpace.

Although the CNN debates were available online through YouTube immediately after the television broadcast, on September 27, former Senator John Edwards will be the first in a string of presidential candidates to simultaneously take to the stage and to the Net for one hour of dialogue with both an in-house audience and long-distance Web junkies.

The public can submit questions for discussion throughout the events via text message, instant message and e-mail, and the Q&A sessions will be webcast live and in real-time on MySpaceTV.com and MTV.com.

Although all the questions for the presidential candidates will have to be submitted electronically and can thus come from remote participants, the discussions themselves—most of them taking place on college campuses—will have an audience of about 100 to 200 students physically present, as well as a moderator, political pundits and MTV News correspondents. Aside from the intervention of the moderator, who will choose discussion questions from among the submissions, the dialogue will be relatively uncensored.

Between September and December, the two social media giants will host 11 webcast discussions accompanied by real-time polling for candidates from both parties: Democrats Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Sen. Chris Dodd, Sen. Barack Obama and Gov. Bill Richardson; and Republicans Sen. Sam Brownback, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Rep. Duncan Hunger, Sen. John McCain, Rep. Ron Paul, and former Gov. Mitt Romney.

YouTube Generation Spins Its Own Political Webs

Not since President Clinton rocked the world of presidential campaigning by becoming the first candidate to engage in face-to-face discussions with MTV viewers has a presidential race so shattered the norms of the conventional campaign trail.

Like their CNN and YouTube contemporaries, MTV and MySpace—two of the most prominent media forums catering to today’s under-30 crowd—are relying on their Internet-juiced audiences to embrace the new era of politics-on-the-Web.

“Our expectation was that they were really going to use the Web and let the wisdom of the crowd help drive politics in a more democratic way,” said David Colarusso, a Massachusetts physics teacher, about the CNN/YouTube debates in an article by Mary Anne Ostrom in The Mercury News, (“YouTube Presidential Debate Breaks the Rules,” July 19, 2007).

The executives at MTV and MySpace view their innovation as a means of engaging their young adult audiences in a political dialogue that they typically eschew—a sort of Rock the Vote for the YouTube era.

“We very much want to take the Iowa or New Hampshire living room global,” says Jeff Bernam, general manager of MySpaceTV, in an Associated Press article by Jake Coyle (“MySpace, MTV to Offer Candidate Chats,” Aug. 22, 2007).

The webcast sessions aren’t meant to be traditional face-to-face town hall debates simply transplanted into cyberspace, but rather face-to-webcam conversations geared specifically toward their audience’s digital sensibilities.

“This is not a debate,” says MTV spokesman Ian Rowe in Coyle’s article. “Each one of these dialogues is an opportunity for young people both on a college campus as well as millions watching via a live stream on MySpace and MTV.com to have a one-on-one, direct, unfiltered conversation with each candidate.”

A Blessing and a Burden for Political Campaigning

The CNN/YouTube debate attracted 2.6 million viewers, an audience only slightly smaller than that for MSNBC’s traditional debate in June. With roughly 43 million regular MySpace users and millions more young people online in general, this latest test of online political engagement has just as much potential for viewership success.

But some critics argue that the whole concept of Internet-driven political activism is inherently elitist.

With less than half of the U.S. adult (18 and older) population having high-speed Internet access, according to a recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, potential participants with the capability to partake in the MySpace and MTV Web-only discussions would be limited to those who understand the technology and can afford high-speed service.

According to the Pew study, only 30 percent of those who earn less than $30,000 a year have high-speed Internet access, compared to more than three-fourths of those who make at least $75,000.

“The danger with [the online campaign platform] is that … we have a digital divide in broadband,” says Barbara O’Connor, director of California State University-Sacramento’s Institute for the Study of Politics and Media, in Ostrom’s article.

On the other hand, it’s hard to deny the reach of a technological revolution that has, in some ways, created a more democratic presidential election season.

Even at traditional face-to-face town hall–style debates, only the handful of attendees who are lucky enough to gain admission into one of the few debate locations nationwide stand the slim chance of having their questions answered.

But the Web has opened up the realm of possibilities for the average Joe sitting at his computer in Fessenden, N.D., to communicate with jet setting and often hard-to-reach presidential candidates, whether it’s by e-mail, MySpace comment posts or the upcoming webcasts.

In today’s online climate, says Steve Grove, YouTube’s news and politics editor, in Ostrom’s article, “politicians are hearing the hearts and minds of the American people in new ways.”

Talk to the education finance advisors at NextStudent. They have all the information and advice you need on student loans. Check out www.nextstudent.com.

Student Loan Girl

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