Media Type: News Clips

Is ‘Learn Now, Pay Later’ Just Another Student Debt Trap?

“There’s this deep and fundamental incompatibility with buy now, pay later and education financing,” says Ben Kaufman, director of research and investigations at the Student Borrower Protection Center, a nonprofit organization that advocates for student loan borrowers. “Is there ever a worse place for that to be than higher education when there isn’t even collateral underlying the product?”

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Your College Choice: How to See If a School Is Legit

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Actually, maybe don’t learn to code

Ben Kaufman, director of research and investigations at the Student Borrower Protection Center, says boot camps are more broadly reflective of the country’s refusal to recognize education as a public good. Instead, it’s viewed as something people should pay — often quite a lot — to access.

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Over 9 million student-loan borrowers are eligible to get their debt wiped out — but fewer than 2% of them have actually gotten that relief, new report finds

“…based on recent data from the Education Department, the SBPC found that while over 9 million public servants have student debt and are eligible for loan forgiveness, just 2% – or 130,730 – have actually seen relief since November 2020. That’s partly because, according the SBPC, fewer than 15% of the 9 million borrowers have filed paperwork to track their PSLF progress.”

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Student loan forgiveness is the overlooked remedy that could help close the racial wealth gap

“Truly wealthy families do not borrow for college at all and do not hold student loans,” Kat Welbeck, director of advocacy and civil rights counsel at the Student Borrower Protection Center, told Fortune. “And when they do, they pay off debt much more quickly. The way we measure ‘progressivity’ with nearly every other social program is how benefits compare to a share of income. Student debt-to-income ratios are much higher for the poorest households, and therefore the…

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She Accused Her Ex-Husband of Abuse. She’s Still Stuck With His Student Loans.

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Student loan defaults are a big barrier to prison education. The government is offering new help.

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The Student Loan Pause Has Been Extended Until the End of August

NPR’s Leila Fadel talks to Mike Pierce of the Student Borrower Protection Center, about plans to extend the student loan payment pause and a reset for roughly 7 million borrowers who are in default.

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Exclusive: How the most affordable student loan program failed low-income borrowers

“That is one of the most concerning things that you’ve highlighted because the people with the $0 payments are the folks in financial distress,” says Persis Yu of the Student Borrower Protection Center. “If that payment is not tracked adequately, it means that they’re in debt that they don’t owe. And to build a system in which we utterly fail the lowest income borrowers so explicitly is just inexcusable.”

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How the pandemic unfairly saddled low-income California college students with debt

Voice piece by Jonathan Glater, Charlie Eaton, and Laura Hamilton

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