Tomorrow, the House Financial Services Committee’s Fintech Task Force is holding a hearing on the use of alternative data to expand access to credit. It is critical that the Committee examine what I believe is a dangerous and discriminatory trend—the use of education data for determining creditworthiness under the guise...
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there's good reason to think that some, if not all, ISAs involve a debt and are therefore "credit," for various federal regulatory purposes. The most natural read of the statutes is that ISAs are credit and subject to the full panoply of federal consumer finance regulations. Certainly from a purposivist...
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Betsy DeVos Wants to Give a Free Pass to the Student Loan Company That Ripped Off 78,000 Servicemembers By Austin Evers and Seth Frotman | June 18, 2019 Last week, the U.S. Department of Education’s student lending arm, the Office of Federal Student Aid, radically changed the landscape of its...
Learn More The Trump Administration has raised the stakes for tens of millions of borrowers, pulling down planned consumer protections while advancing a sweeping new proposal that will cause more than 37 million borrowers’ loans to change companies in the coming years. The following guest post from Persis Yu, Director of the...
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For years, advocates, law enforcement, and regulators have been sounding the alarm on the impending Public Service Loan Forgiveness crisis. Millions of dedicated public servants have devoted their careers to serving their communities, based on the promise of the PSLF program. But now, as the first cohort of eligible borrowers...
Learn More For the past two years, this country has seen huge rollbacks of protections for consumers—from attacks on servicemembers’ rights to rules that protect borrowers of color from discrimination. Each time we think we’ve hit rock bottom and start believing that it can’t get any worse, the Trump Administration pulls out...
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There has been a great deal of misinformation spread through state capitals about a special kind of private sector student loan company known as a "Guaranty Agency." Industry lobbyists have tried to convince lawmakers that these companies are not performing "student loan servicing" under the definition commonly included in state...
Learn More We are used to thinking of the higher education financing crisis through the lens of a singular issue: student loans. But recent court settlements at for-profit colleges have shed light on a less traditional type of student debt: past-due financial accounts, otherwise known as accounts receivable. While defaulted student loans...
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There is a great deal of misinformation surrounding student loans in bankruptcy. Most people believe that anything called a “student loan,” or any debt made to a student, cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. This notion is fundamentally untrue.
Learn More The recent law enforcement crackdown on for-profit colleges is well documented. These schools mislead students by promising a fast track to a brighter future and then loaded students up with mountains of debt for worthless degrees—a form of consumer fraud that stretches back for decades. But the public may be...
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