FAIR MONEY

Face to Face with Inequality

Category Archives: educational debt


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Bank Robbery

In May of this year, Rose graduated from college with a Bachelor’s in Business Administration. She was flying high: she had her degree, she had started her own business, a nail salon, which was close to running a profit, she liked living in San Jose with her boyfriend. Life was good, and she was taking a vacation with her parents to celebrate her achievements.

The first thing that augured a problem was pretty innocuous: a credit card purchase was declined. These things happen, and Rose didn’t pay too much attention. She was on vacation after all. Next, she got an email that her credit limit was increased to $1900, from $1500, without further explanation. A week or so later, she found out that the Wells Fargo bank account she used for internet purchases was wildly in the red. How could this have happened?

Someone had gotten into Rose’s bank account, which had  $25 in it at the time, and siphoned about $1400 to Western Union, where it becomes essentially untraceable. The bank account is linked to her credit card–the one for which the credit limit was raised. The fraudulent transaction went through, but since the credit limit on her card was insufficient to cover the amount, she ended up maxed out on her credit card and in the red on her bank account.

Rose appealed to Wells Fargo for help, but all they did was slap her with one overdraft fee after another. Everyone she talked to said it was not their fault. They said they would investigate, but only after she had reported the theft to the police and to the FBI. Even so, they didn’t offer her much hope of recovery. She went to the police, to see if they would help her, but they said there was nothing they could do. And the overdraft fees kept coming. She went to the FBI, because the money had crossed state lines, given the involvement of Western Union, they said there was nothing they could do. And the overdraft fees kept coming.

Now Rose had to borrow money to stop the overdraft bleeding. She requested a personal loan, to get back into the black, but the overdraft fees had ruined her credit score and the bank declined to give her the loan. And the overdraft fees kept coming. She tried other banks, but they declined to help her for the same reason. And the overdraft fees kept coming, the overdraft fees kept coming. So Rose tried to get a payday loan, but all they can give you is $400 and by now she needed thousands. She tried crowdfunding to come up with the money, but she didn’t make her goal and came up with zero. And the overdraft fees kept coming.

In more and more desperate straits, Rose turned to her family and asked for help. She had hesitated, because in her community it is embarrassing to owe money, even if it’s not your fault. At first, her family didn’t understand her situation. When they finally did understand, they told her they didn’t have anything to spare. And, remember, all this time, the overdraft fees kept coming. In all, it took about a month for the bank to put her $3000 in the red.

Eventually Rose gave up and turned to an online usury outfit, loanme.com, which offered her a $3100 loan,  took $100 off the top in fees, and then started charging her  an interest rate of 135%.

By now Rose has two jobs. She’s a carrier for Amazon, with irregular hours. She has another part-time job, also with irregular hours. She’s running her nail salon–which generates just enough revenue to allow her to pay her employee. And she’s looking for a better-paying job to be able to pay back that loanme.com loan. She hopes to pay  off that loan before the end of the year, because in January her student loans kick in. So far, she has paid $800 to loanme.com, of which $2.00 went to reduce the principal, meaning she still owes $3098. What if she can’t pay it off before January? “Then I’m screwed,” Rose explains.

So here’s the score:

  • Thief takes about $1400 (illegally, but with impunity).
  • Bank takes something on the order of $3000 (totally legally).
  • Loanme.com takes at least another $3000 or so (legally) if Rose pays off the loan by December. Much more if she can’t (also legally).

They are pretty much indistiguishable, except the legal ones seem to have more leverage.

So what to do? There are a few things:

Any other ideas? Please let us know. We’d love to hear them.


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What Would Happen … ?

This Sunday’s New York Times has an editorial by Lee Siegel about refusing to repay one’s student loans, as Siegel himself has done.  He suggests that if only more people would follow his example, a long sequence of  good things would start to happen. At the end of this sequence, like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, we will find affordable higher education.

The collection agencies retained by the Department of Education would be exposed as the greedy vultures that they are. The government would get out of the loan-making and the loan-enforcement business. Congress might even explore a special, universal education tax that would make higher education affordable.

There would be a national shaming of colleges and universities for charging soaring tuition rates that are reaching lunatic levels. The rapacity of American colleges and universities is turning social mobility, the keystone of American freedom, into a commodified farce.

If people groaning under the weight of student loans simply said, “Enough,” then all the pieties about debt that have become absorbed into all the pieties about higher education might be brought into alignment with reality. Instead of guaranteeing loans, the government would have to guarantee a college education.

Sounds nice. But it might perhaps be a slight bit optimistic.


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PAYE Stands for …?

Anna Bahr presents an analysis of the impact of Obama’s recent “Pay as You Earn” legislation, suggesting that it might really stand for PAY Extra. According to Bahr, “PAYE tends to save money only for those low-income borrowers who have incurred an unusually large federal debt.” Bahr offers a few examples of people with more usual loan amounts, who would actually pay more under PAYE than under current rules, because as they repay more slowly they will incur more interest on their outstanding loans.


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Two Questions Suffice?

According to Susan Dynarski and Judith Scott-Clayton, the FAFSA could consist of just 2 questions and more people would manage to go to college and stay there until they get their degree (The Cost of Complexity in Federal Student Aid).

I have a lot of other questions. For instance, what would happen then? Would we have more college grads with good jobs and solid prospects? Or would we have even more young adults with staggering educational debt and a hard time finding a halfway decent job? It’s instructive to consider the post-graduation realities laid out in It’s Official: The Boomerang Won’t Leave. According to that article, “more than half of recent college graduates are unemployed or underemployed, meaning that they make substandard wages, in jobs that don’t require a college degree.”

One last question: how do you fix that?


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Forum on Student Debt in Palo Alto 4/24

pyd poster

Jeffrey Greger of the FAIR Money team will be joining Assemblymember Bob Wieckowski (author of the Students’ Bill of Rights), and Dave Walter (Stanford Law School’s Associate Director of Financial Aid) this Thursday in Palo Alto for a public forum on student debt. We encourage you to take part if you’re available, and look forward to seeing you there!

Thursday, April 24, in the Fireside Room at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, 505 E Charleston Road, Palo Alto, CA 94306.

Event Agenda:
6:00pm – Doors open*
6:30pm – Discussion begins
— Opening remarks, moderated discussion, audience questions
7:45pm – Event concludes

*Light refreshments will be provided.


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How Exactly Do Colleges Allocate Their Financial Aid? They Won’t Say.

An article written by Marian Wang on Pro Publica poses the sticky question in the title above. To receive financial aid, a student and their family must undergo a thorough investigation into their financial lives. To quote from the article:

Many universities have access to comprehensive financial profiles, sometimes down to the type of cars a family drives. Some analyze patterns and interpret even the most subtle indicators from students, such as the order in which schools are listed on the federal financial-aid application, or even how long a student stays on the phone with an admissions officer.

However, information transfer is not a two-way street. Universities, even the most charitable, generally consider the metrics used to offer financial aid packages to be in the same category as state secrets. Again from the article:

Take Newman University, a Catholic liberal-arts college based in Kansas.

What are the actual criteria the college uses to determine who gets aid and how much?  “That’s proprietary information,” said Pam Johnson, Newman’s interim dean of admissions and financial aid. “It’s part of our competitive strategy.”

The full article is well worth your time.


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Educational Inequality and Increasing Social Rigidity

In a New York Times op-ed on the self-reinforcing nature of inequality, Robert Frank writes “perhaps the most import new feedback loop shows up in higher education. Tighter budgets in middle-class families make it harder for them to afford the special tutors and other environmental advantages that help more affluent students win admission to elite universities. Financial aid helps alleviate these problems, but the children of affluent families graduate debt-free and move quickly into top-paying jobs, while the children of other families face lesser job prospects and heavy loads of student debt. All too often, the less affluent experience the miracle of compound interest in reverse.” (See full article, The Vicious Circle of Income Inequality.) What does that mean for higher education? Frank proposes that “we’ll want to think more creatively about public policies that might contain” any of the feedback loops that increase inequality. How about a little more self-scrutiny and creative thinking on the part of institutions of higher education?


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Is It Worth It? – Part III

Economists suggest college is a great value, as every year of higher education translates on average into 6% more pay every year (see Part I). But if you ask the American public, the answer is not so rosy.

Pew Research Center poll showing different perceptions of the value of college among the general public and college presidents.

A Pew Research Center survey from 2011 shows that the majority of  Americans think college is less than a good value. This raises the question of what informs that judgment. Is it that tuition has gone up without a concomitant rise in quality of the education offered? Is there an underlying perception of unfairness? Do people see other avenues to getting a higher wage? Does the hardship of coming up with the funds during college cause so much pain that future earnings don’t feel like adequate compensation? Do people really think they are subsidizing research that doesn’t actually improve the quality of the education one receives?

Gaining a better understanding of what the real answers are would probably make a big difference to the overall college experience and to the way that colleges can market their services.


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Is It Worth It? – Part II

Bob Samuels of the AFT has calculated the cost to society of free public higher education. His magic number is a cost of $127 billion annually, a figure offset by a variety of savings. (For instance, we’d see a significant reduction in the cost of student loan programs. And we could reap more taxes by ending tax breaks on on education-related investments, which turn out to be a handy tax shelter for the rich.)

By my calculations Samuels’ total cost, never mind the offsets, would be approximately the same amount of taxpayer money as the cost of war since 2001.

I haven’t got a clue how to calculate the total social benefit of free college tuition at all public institutions of higher learning in the U.S., but I am pretty sure we’d get more out of it than we get out of the war in Afghanistan.