State Attorney General Bill McCollum sent a questionnaire to all Florida public colleges and universities.
The questionnaire asks if preferred lenders have offered them any incentives and to disclose their relationships with lenders. The attorney general says these types of practices keep schools from objectively providing students with fair choices and some students agree.
“It puts them [...]
Wading into a roaring national controversy, Attorney General Martha Coakley is investigating whether Massachusetts colleges have improper relationships with loan companies, her office said yesterday.
“Every prospective student deserves a fair chance of financing a college education,” she said in a statement.
Several other attorneys general, most notably Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, as well as [...]
Though much news recently has focused on the problems in selecting a student-loan provider — thanks to allegations that some lenders and financial-aid offices have been in cahoots — for many students graduating this spring, the larger issue is how to pay back all that debt.
It’s no small matter. The median debt load for graduates [...]
Investigations by U.S. lawmakers into the student loan industry expanded as Reps George Miller, D-Calif., and chairman of the House education committee, sent a letter to the inspector general of the Education Department asking for a review of the department’s policies against conflicts of interest and the financial disclosure forms of employees overseeing the federal [...]
The chairman of the U.S. Senate’s education committee said on Thursday he has written to the heads of two major student lenders over concerns about loan collection tactics, opening a new line of inquiry in a fast-expanding scandal in the student loan business.
“I am concerned that several private lenders may be engaging in harsh and [...]
ScholarshipPoints.com, a free service from the Student Loan Network, has announced its first quarter scholarship winners. Chris Wendorf, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, received the first-place scholarship of $1000; Jonald Allan Gonzalez, Brigham Young University - Hawaii, received the second-place $500 scholarship; and Helen Hawkey, University of Pittsburgh, took the third-place $250 scholarship. All three [...]
Some lending companies with access to a national database that contains confidential information on 60 million student borrowers have repeatedly searched it in ways that violate federal rules, raising alarms about data mining and abuse of privacy, government and university officials said.
The improper searching has grown so pervasive that officials said the Education Department is [...]
New York state is offering colleges settlements in its investigation into student loan kickbacks if the schools promise to follow a code of conduct, according to published reports.
Attorney General Andrew Cuomo sent settlement agreements to colleges around the country, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported Friday. If the colleges didn’t sign, Cuomo threatened to serve [...]
HARRISBURG - The state’s student loan agency, already the focus of negative publicity for its travel expenses, has a new critic.
The governor.
“It has to have a total housecleaning,” Gov. Rendell said of the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency. “When the cost of college is more and more challenging to Pennsylvanians and their families, we can’t [...]
Katie Schaefer of Leola might find it easier to pay for college in the coming years.
Schaefer is a sophomore elementary and special education major at Northern State University. She has scholarships, grants and loans to pay for her education.
President Bush recently signed a law increasing the maximum yearly Pell Grant to $4,310, up $260. Yearly [...]