Marginalized Populations

Read more about specific populations or see below for a combined feed:

Older Borrowers

Latino/a borrowers

Black Borrowers

LGBTQ+ Borrowers

Veteran Borrowers

Incarcerated Borrowers

News Clips

Feb 6, 2020

Graduates Of Historically Black Colleges May Be Paying More For Loans: Watchdog Group

“It really raised some alarm flags,” said Kat Welbeck, the civil rights counsel at the nonprofit Student Borrower Protection Center.

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Reports

Feb 5, 2020

Educational Redlining

The SBPC’s analysis of fintech and banking products uncovered cases where a prospective borrower may be hit with thousands of dollars in additional credit costs if he or she attended a community college, an Historically Black College or University (HBCU), or an Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI).

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Press Releases

Feb 5, 2020

New Report Finds ‘Educational Redlining’ Penalizes Borrowers Who Attended Community Colleges and Minority-Serving Institutions, Perpetuates Systemic Disparities

Advocacy organization calls on congress, regulators to crack down on consumer lenders’ use of education data, warns of fair lending abuses.

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News Clips

Jan 15, 2020

Seniors crushed by student debt push for Virginia Bill of Rights

Virginia lawmakers are being pressed to pass a proposed student-loan borrower “Bill of Rights” by a group most wouldn’t think of with school debt — Virginians age 50 or older.

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Blogs

Jan 8, 2020

Communities of Color in Crisis: Examining Racial Disparities in Student Loan Debt and Borrower Outcomes

As reports of widespread servicing breakdowns leading to significant borrower harm continue to emerge, it is critical that we examine the disparity in loan performance between borrowers of color in comparison to their white peers, the role of student loan servicers in exacerbating these outcomes, and the federal inaction that allows potential discrimination by student loan companies to go unchecked.

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Blogs

Jul 24, 2019

Educational Redlining? The use of education data in underwriting could leave HBCU and MSI graduates in the dark

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 of “innovation.”

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Letters & Memos

Jul 18, 2019

SBPC and SVA Urge Department of Education to Protect Service Members from Student Loan Abuses

In a letter to Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the SBPC and Student Veterans of America (SVA), urges the Department of Education to abandon a policy intended to obstruct oversight by agencies charged with enforcing law that protect military borrowers including the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA).

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Blogs

Jun 18, 2019

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 planned billion-dollar contract to reshape student loan servicing in a move that tips the scales for Navient, one of the nation’s largest student […]

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Blogs

Feb 1, 2019

The Predatory Underworld of Companies that Target Veterans for a Buck

By Tariq Habash and Mike Saunders | February 1, 2019 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 […]

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News Clips

Jan 27, 2019

Women, older adults facing student loan debt in record numbers

The number of people ages 60 and above with college debt in New York has risen 44 percent between 2012 and 2017.

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EXPLORE MORE

Federal Loan Servicing Abuse

Aidvantage/MAXIMUS

Nelnet/Great Lakes