Programs for Education

Borrowers Beware

Recently I have been asked to help recent college graduates who are faced with enormous student debt. In some instances they have had taken co-signer loans while in college. Those lenders like Sallie Mae were offering them in incredible amounts over the last 10 years. The rules varied as to when (and if) the credit worthy cosigner would be released from the obligation.

In 90% of the cases that will never happen and the lenders know that.  

This article is about the misinformation and complex terms in college lending. Unfortunately, Congress over the years has been heavily influenced by the lending companies (now being bailed out by taxpayer money) and the colleges themselves.

None of them have the student’s long-term best interest as a priority. That is a shame. To get a quick understanding of the problem listen to this.

At Programs for Education, we have options ambitious students can take advantage of to pay off their debt faster. If you know of any student facing enormous debt now or in the future, give us a call.  Many families are paying for college from cash flow alone with this program.

In addition. all current students can learn about the various loan forgiveness and debt relief programs for graduates entering certain fields of employment. In the meantime If a student is considering future college costs, now is the time to do a “Dry Run” to see how much they may have to borrow, if at all.

Not everyone would willingly choose to become the public face of the debt-ridden. Alan Collinge didn’t exactly choose to do so, defaulting on $38,000 in student loans only after a series of missteps and strokes of misfortune, but he has embraced his situation with gusto, founding StudentLoanJustice.org to advocate for distressed borrowers and now writing a book, The Student Loan Scam (Beacon Press).

Collinge’s tactics have at times been controversial — he has been criticized for personally attacking student loan lobbyists, for instance — but with the Obama administration putting the student loan programs front and center in its higher education agenda, the industry he writes about and his views are likely to remain relevant. In an e-mail interview, Collinge discussed his personal experiences and his assertion that none of the policy changes currently being debated will make a difference for borrowers without reform of federal bankruptcy laws.

Q. Can you give our readers the 1-minute version of how you ended up getting into such a jam with student loans? How much of your situation evolved because of your own (potentially flawed) decisions, and how much because of the unfair practices or policies or rules by other parties?

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6 Scams That Target College Students

By Kim Clark , US News & World Report 

Operating on the theory that it takes a thief to steal from a thief, a group of Internet scammers has been targeting students who illegally download music, books, and video.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has reported on an apparently bogus collections agency that sent out letters to Bucknell students demanding $500 to settle the students’ alleged illegal downloads.

That’s a new twist on an old strategy of targeting college students. Prosecutors say there are at least six common scams students should watch out for:

1. Fake scholarship promises: The Federal Trade Commission warns against advisers and Web services that charge big fees in return for help locating scholarships.

2. Dodgy student loans: U.S. News‘s Kim Palmer documented how some students have been misled by official-looking documents that were really ads for expensive loans.

One silver lining of the recent economic downturn is a reduction in expensive private loans and lenders. But the FTC says students still need to make sure they stick with low-cost, legitimate education loans. The best deals, says the Project on Student Debt, are the federally backed student loans such as the Perkins (which charges just 5 percent in interest) and Stafford loans. (more…)

Colleges Move to Organize Retention Efforts

By Beckie Supiano

Colleges are organizing their efforts to improve retention, but the resources they are using may not be equal to the task. That’s the assessment Jerome A. Lucido, vice provost for enrollment policy and management at the University of Southern California, shared at a session of the College Board Forum in New York this past Friday.

The session used data from a survey conducted as part of the College Board Study on Student Retention in partnership with the Project on Academic Success at Indiana University at Bloomington and the Center for Enrollment Research, Policy, and Practice at the University of Southern California, which Mr. Lucido directs. The researchers hope their study of institutional practices will provide a base line for analyzing which retention practices are effective.

Connecting colleges’ retention efforts to their results can be difficult, said Mary Ziskin, senior associate director of the Project on Academic Success, because “institutions that have low retention rates tend to put more efforts into retention.”

The survey was sent to 1,484 colleges nationwide, of which 442 responded. It built on the results of a pilot survey conducted several years ago. (more…)

Do you have a student or are you a student with aspirations to be a Doctor of Medicine? With all the talk about health care issues and challenges, our basic western system of allopathic medicine continues to frustrate both the patient and care giver.

My philosophy of placing more emphasis on prevention rather than treatment is making more sense as costs become more unmanageable. It is all about the “ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure.” Particularly when the “cure” is simply designed to manage the symptoms with questionable drugs and not address the real cause of disease. Now, with Codex Alimentarius, it will be illegal for a physician to practice proven alternative therapies to heal the body and/or prevent the disease in the first place.  

Future Docs Are Confused, Too

October 2, 2009

Struggling to understand the national debate over health care? You’re not alone — your future doctor may well be baffled, too.

A study published in the September issue of Academic Medicine found that nearly half of all medical students believe they have been inadequately educated about the “practice of medicine” — especially related to medical economics.

“Our patients expect us to understand the system,” said Matthew M. Davis, one of the researchers and an associate professor of pediatrics and internal medicine in the Child Health Evaluation and Research Unit at the University of Michigan’s medical school. “If we don’t, that can result in poor patient care. And if we don’t expect doctors to understand the health care system, who is going to?”

The study, by Davis and two colleagues at Michigan, examined tens of thousands of survey responses from medical students about the extent and perceived quality of their training in an array of curricular areas, including clinical care and decision-making and the practice of medicine — with the latter including health care systems, managed care, and practice management, among other areas.    (more…)