Student Debt

Update: Add Florida to the list, as the University of Miami caves to Sallie Mae:

According to excellent reporting in the St. Petersburg Times, many University of Miami incoming freshmen were surprised this summer when they received pre-filled out master promissory notes from loan giant Sallie Mae even though they never actually applied for a loan. The students were particularly shocked to see that the notes included personal information, such as their Social Security numbers and birthdates, which they had not authorized the university to release.

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Higher Education Watch is reporting a disturbing piece of news. Sallie Mae and other corporate lenders are using state Freedom of Information Laws in a bid to force colleges and universities to hand over private information about students and their financial status. So far these types of requests are known to have been filed in New York, Pennsylvania and Oregon.

According to Higher Ed Watch, Sallie Mae will not challenge any schools that refuse to comply with the request, and insist that their intent in making such requests is to inform students of "all of their financial options." That is a hard pill to swallow. Sallie Mae is a company that profits by pushing more costly private loans on students over loans that come directly from the federal government. As Higher Ed Watch notes, a more likely explanation is that Sallie Mae and other lenders are targeting schools where they have failed to be included on the preferred lender list - a listing of private lending institutions that school financial aid offices provide to students who need to fill in the gaps in their funding after grants and federal lending options are exhausted.

What can be done? Students at schools can engage their financial aid offices to see if Sallie Mae or other lenders have issues such requests, and activists can work towards strengthening the Family Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act. FOI laws were created to increase transparency in government, not to allow corporations to exploit young people trying to pay for an education.

• Rock the Vote blog has an excellent post on how anyone can do DIY voter analysis using Census data and some cheap software. The instructions are meticulous and slightly intimidating, but the writer makes it sound like something you could figure out in an afternoon. I've got to give that a try . . .
• YouTube announced that you will soon be able to sort candidate videos by issue, making a nice little tool for compare/contrast purposes.
• Three interesting things to check out for those interested in how the evangelicals (and other young people of faith) are doing it these days: Youthroots - a social networking site for people of faith; BattleCry - the online home of a (crazy/scary) hipster evangelical movement; and with young evangelicals worrying about poverty and global warming, the WireTap Blog asks "Is God now progressive?"
• The New America Foundation documents how our generation's GI's are getting the shaft when they return home from duty:
  

  Although military recruiting literature trumpets educational benefits of up to $72,900, for most recruits the benefit tops out at $38,700. That works out to $1,075 a month for 36 months. It might sound like a lot to a teenager looking for help with college, but it’s only 75 percent of the average cost of attendance at a public four-year-college or university. To be eligible for those benefits, servicemen and women have to contribute $1,200 up front, out of their own pockets, during their first two years of service. Virtually all do so, but nearly one-in-three never collect any educational benefits, and they don’t get a refund. Most important, GI Bill benefits are counted as student financial resources when veterans apply for federal student financial aid, making many veterans ineligible for Pell Grants or subsidized student loans that could fill the gap. For recruits from low-income backgrounds, that’s a huge loss.

• Barack Obama is scheduled to be on the Daily Show on Wednesday the 22nd.
• Check out this podcast of Anya Kamenetz of Generation Debt.