Student Loan Blog

While acting last Thursday to approve the creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which will expand federal oversight of private student loans, a Congressional panel at the same time voted to reject a proposal that would have included school-sponsored “gap loans” under the authority of the new CFPA. The House Financial Services ...

Three former University of Phoenix students are suing the for-profit higher education giant for using a questionable loan repayment practice that skews the university’s default rate and takes away federal student loan repayment options from students who withdraw from the school, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Lawsuit ...

Language in the bill, currently before Congress, to re-authorize the Higher Education Act could lead distance-learning institutions to use home-monitoring devices to police their students who take courses online, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (“New Systems Keep a Close Eye on Online Students at Home,” July ...

Under new federal legislation, many students at for-profit institutions have seen the amount of their Pell and federal student loan awards increase and a larger number these students have been able to cover all their college costs with just these two types of federal financial aid, according to an article in The Chronicle of ...

While Congress is heading home for its annual Fourth of July recess, there are still many higher-education bills and pieces of legislation that need to be addressed before they break, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Higher- Education Bills Are Among Congress's Unfinished Business,” June 30,2008). Chief ...

Some small U.S. colleges and universities are concerned that they may be the target of a new bill that would force schools with multi -billion dollar endowments, like Harvard, to reduce their tuition costs, and place other high-tuition institutions without large endowments at a financial disadvantage when competing for students, ...

Once Congress negotiates the latest reauthorization terms of the Higher Education Act, colleges will likely be required to report to the federal government on at least 300 new topics including tuition increases, transfer-of-credit policies, and file sharing, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Colleges Must Prepare ...

Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., will “pinch hit” for Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. — the chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions who is recovering from surgery to treat a malignant brain tumor — in Senate and House negotiations to overhaul the Higher Education Act (HR 4137 and S 1642). Mikulski, the third-most ...

In a recent letter to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Ways and Means, Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vermont, proposed restricting IRA rollover contributions to colleges that don’t use their endowments to help low and middle-income students pay for college, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Proposal Would ...

In the last six months alone, since legislators eliminated over $21 billion in subsidies to student loan lenders in the Federal Family Education Loan Program, at least 44 FFELP lenders have stopped originating federal student loans.This exodus of lenders from the federal student loan program, combined with the current credit and liquidity crunch ...