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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Community Colleges Want to Control How Much Certain Students Can Borrow in Student Loans

Student Loan Girl — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 23:54:00 GMT

Concerned that some students at two-year schools may borrow more in federal student loans than they can afford to repay, community college officials want the federal government to give community colleges control over how much their students can borrow in federal aid.

Community colleges want the authority to deny some of their own students the right to take out federally subsidized loans, because the schools believe that some students may not earn enough after graduation to repay their student loan debt, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Community Colleges Want Their Authority, Not Banks,’ Over Student Borrowing,” June 18, 2008).

The change is needed because colleges currently have no way of preventing a student from taking out a college loan that doesn’t make economic sense given the student’s long-term job prospects, says David Baime, vice president of government relations for the American Association of Community Colleges.

The association, which represents more than 1,200 institutions nationwide, is pushing for legislation that would give community colleges the right to control how much their students can borrow, rather than being at the mercy of private lenders who can stop lending to certain schools at any time. The AACC is lobbying for this authority after a recent move by some of the nation’s biggest banks to stop offering student loans to certain community colleges and other two-year institutions.

The banks’ decision to cease lending to these schools also prompted Democratic Senators Patty Murray and Christopher Dodd to introduce legislation that would prohibit lenders from ‘cherry-picking’ which schools they do business with.

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Student Loan Blog : student loan debt, college graduation

College Student Finance Guru Blogs His Way to Book Deal

Community Colleges Want to Control How Much Certain Students Can Borrow in Student Loans