http://chronicle.com/article/Many-More-Students-Are-Defa/66223/ July 11, 2010 Government Vastly Undercounts Defaults Many More Students Are Defaulting Than Official Tallies
By Kelly Field The share of borrowers who default on their student loans is bigger than the federal government's short-term data suggest, with thousands more facing damaged credit histories and millions more tax dollars being lost in the long run. According to unpublished data obtained by The Chronicle, one in every five government loans that entered repayment in 1995 has gone into default. The default rate is higher for loans made to students from two-year colleges, and higher still, reaching 40 percent, for those who attended for-profit institutions. The numbers represent thousands of students like Lourdes Samedy, of Boston, who ended up defaulting on about $7,000 in student loans after completing a nine-month-long medical-assistant program at Corinthian Colleges Inc. Everest College, and now cannot get a job. They also show that the government's official "cohort-default rate," which measures the percentage of borrowers who default in the first two years of repayment and is used to penalize colleges with high rates, downplays the long-term cost of defaults, capturing only a sliver of the loans that eventually lapse. While the data obtained by The Chronicle are not directly comparable to the two-year rate, which reports defaults by borrowers rather than loans, they reveal that default rates continue to climb years after borrowers have left college, particularly among students who attended two-year and for-profit colleges. For loans made to community-college students, the 15-year default rate is 31 percent. David S. Baime, senior vice president for government relations at the American Association of Community Colleges, called that number "shockingly high." "It's really just a tragedy given the consequences of student loan default," he said. Borrowers who default on their student loans face significant personal and financial burdens. They become ineligible for additional federal aid and may have their wages and tax refunds seized by the government. Their negative credit records make it harder for them to obtain car loans, mortgages, and credit cards, and even apartments or jobs. When they can get loans, they pay higher interest rates. (clip) --- http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-07-27/news/nyc-college-building-boom-bubble/ Will NYC's College Building Boom Bubble Pop? New York's universities have grand expansion plans, but could the economy--and online courses--doom them to failure before they've even begun? St. John’s University in Queens has already spent almost $160 million on a new student center and classroom upgrades during the past two years alone. Fordham, the New School, and John Jay College of Criminal Justice are all betting on big campus expansions. And over the next three decades, NYU and Columbia are preparing to shell out nearly $10 billion for academic and administrative buildings, dormitories, research labs, and even unrelated commercial ventures like a hotel and a jazz club. Yet just as some of these schools get ready to send shovels into the ground, a weakened economy threatens to undermine even the best-laid plans. Students and their parents are increasingly reluctant to take on debt, especially at a time when job security is in doubt, says Joseph Marr Cronin, a longtime university administrator and former Massachusetts secretary of education. It’s a trend that’s reflected in the growth of community colleges—which now account for nearly half of undergraduate enrollment—and online schools. “Today, there are four million students taking one or more courses online,” Cronin says. “You don’t need a building for that. All of a sudden, the market for the most expensive colleges could really stall.” Cronin is part of a Greek chorus warning of a higher education “bubble,” brought on—like the subprime mortgage crisis—by easy credit and inflated price tags. One of the most prominent Chicken Littles is Steve Eisman, the hedge-fund manager whose bet against the housing market played out in the pages of Michael Lewis’s bestseller The Big Short. At a Manhattan investment conference in May, Eisman noted rising default rates on student loans—up to 6.7 percent this year from 5.2 percent last year—and predicted that stocks of for-profit colleges could drop by as much as 50 percent: “It’s just like subprime, which grew at any cost and kept weakening its underwriting standards to grow.” But there’s a big difference between publicly traded colleges and prestigious four-year universities like Columbia and NYU, right? Don’t be so sure, warn skeptics. The amount the average family pays for college has ballooned by more than 440 percent over the past 25 years, notes the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. That’s more than four times the rate of inflation, and the only thing keeping the bubble from bursting may have been easy credit. Over the past two years, the number of student loan accounts has gone up by nearly 30 percent to 69 million, according to the credit rating agency Equifax, while balances have exploded five-fold to $527 billion. At the same time, the value of a sheepskin actually declined during the first four years of this decade, according to a 2006 report by the White House Council of Economic Advisers, with average wages for college grads dipping a bit more than 5 percent. All of this could spell bad news for the campus expansions planned by New York City universities. With the exception of John Jay, a CUNY college that charges only $2,300 a semester, “they’re all expensive, which means they depend on students borrowing lots of money to fund their expensive tuition,” observes Glenn Reynolds, the University of Tennessee law school professor and conservative commentator best known for his blog Instapundit.com. The five private schools charge between $31,250 (St. John’s) and $39,900 (Columbia) a year for tuition alone. When you include room and board, NYU costs $53,600 for nine months, and is among the nation’s most expensive colleges. Its average student graduates with more than $33,000 in loans. Doomsayers like to trot out the story of Cortney Munna, a 26-year-old NYU graduate who owes more than $100,000 for her degree in religious and women’s studies. She lamented to The New York Times that she’ll be “slaving away” the rest of her life to pay for a diploma she would “happily give back.” Reynolds has little sympathy for Munna—and even less for NYU. He thinks colleges with expansion plans might be building a house of cards. “If students become less willing or able to borrow a lot of money, will the expansion still be economically viable?” he asks. “And, more significantly, have [the schools] even given that possibility serious thought as part of their planning?” Will They Come? Even as some universities have put campus expansions on hold—Harvard, for example, shelved a $1 billion science complex last December after seeing a 30 percent drop in its endowment—New York City’s colleges paint their bold plans as necessary bids to stay competitive. Some are simply catching up. John Jay College, for example, plans to maintain its full-time enrollment at around 11,400 students even after it completes the $557 million facility that’s currently rising between 58th and 59th streets along Eleventh Avenue, says project coordinator Ynes Leon. “We’ve already run out of room.” Similarly, Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus was built for 3,500 students in the late 1950s, but now serves 8,000. “We’ve needed new facilities for a while,” says Fordham spokesman Bob Howe. After the addition of a new $1 billion building to house dormitories and the graduate schools of law, business, social work, and education, Fordham hopes its enrollment there will increase to slightly more than 11,000 students by 2032. (clip) _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
