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Looming Student Debt Crisis Hits the Senate
Tweet Share on Facebook March 28, 2012 Comment (16)On March 20, your Student Loan Ranger attended "The Looming Student Debt Crisis: Providing Fairness For Struggling Students," a Judiciary Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts hearing. (You can watch a video of the hearing, and we'll give a prize to the first person who sends us a frame showing the Student Loan Ranger in the audience!)
Obviously, that is right up our alley. And the fact that Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) convened the hearing, even though he's not a member of the Subcommittee, piqued our interest, because Durbin is the sponsor of the Fairness for Struggling Students Act of 2011, which would restore the ability to discharge commercial student loans in bankruptcy proceedings.
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Learn What the Student Loan Forgiveness Act Could Mean for You
Tweet Share on Facebook March 21, 2012 Comment (290)On March 8, Congressman Hansen Clarke (D-Mich.) introduced H.R. 4170, the Student Loan Forgiveness Act of 2012.
Normally we don't go into the findings of particular pieces of legislation, but the Student Loan Ranger thinks findings like this are refreshing and show Rep. Clarke is living in the reality most of us inhabit, including:
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Students Have New Outlet for Loan Complaints
Tweet Share on Facebook March 14, 2012 Comment (13)Last week, student loan borrowers (your very own Student Loan Ranger included) received some exciting news when the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau announced, "Our student loan complaint system is open for business."
We are thrilled the CFPB has begun to exercise its oversight authority regarding student loans. We're also wondering whether using the phrase "open for business" was a clever play on words or inadvertent satire, given popular opinion on the student loan business. We're leaning toward the former since we're loving what the Bureau has been doing so far.
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Is Student Debt Prolonging the Recession?
Tweet Share on Facebook March 7, 2012 Comment (25)Numerous people have proposed that forgiving student loan debt would act as a fiscal stimulus, and a SignOn.org petition created by Robert Applebaum of ForgiveStudentLoanDebt.com is available to sign if you agree and are interested in sending that message to President Obama and Congress. But there is also an argument that the nearly $1 trillion in student loan debt is slowing down economic recovery, primarily by constricting the still struggling housing market.
Because we're not economists, we're following Robert Reich, a chancellor's professor of public policy at the University of California—Berkeley, who notes that consumer spending is 70 percent of the U.S. economy and that houses have traditionally been the major assets of America's middle class. Those assets are in freefall.
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