Student Loan Justice Discussion Forum

Here is a link to a great discussion forum for students with loans who want to stay updated on all the latest news; you can also ask questions:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentLoanJustice/

Bad debt pays off in loan industry

Little-known practice called 'dumping' costing taxpayers an estimated $400 million

http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/news/1179045294252111.xml&coll=2&thispage=1

Washington- Alyscia Taylor, a 5-foot-2 Georgia fireball, graduated from chiropractic college outside of Atlanta with an education in treating spines and student loans totaling $53,880.

The debt seemed manageable as she began her career as a chiropractor in suburban Washington, D.C., in 1994. But she had asthma, got recurrent pneumonia and needed to care for parents on a farm near Augusta, Ga. So she moved, eventually left the profession and took sales jobs that paid basic bills but left little for the loans.

That's when the problems began.

Collection agencies called relentlessly. Late fees and interest compounded the debt, churning the $53,880 balance to $134,466 by 2004. By then, many bankers would have figured the loan was uncollectible and declared the matter closed. They would have gotten most of their money back, too, and with interest, because the U.S. Department of Education guarantees the loan industry that it will make up most losses.

But the student loan industry has had a practice, unknown to outsiders, that lets it earn even more money off a bad debt while shifting the problem to taxpayers, a Plain Dealer examination has found. Its official name is Direct Loan default consolidation, and it is costing taxpayers an estimated $400 million.

Insiders in the industry, government and some college financial aid offices have a harsher name for it: "dumping."

What that means is that the borrowers' bad debt, often multiplied because of earlier delinquencies and refinancing, gets turned into a new loan - with interest, late charges and an 18.5 percent handling fee for the industry. But this new, expensive loan is no longer the industry's liability; rather, industry employees convert it into a new government loan, issued under the federal Direct Loan program.

The new loan is shifted from the private sector and dumped on the government.

"The student winds up with a lot more debt, and the taxpayer winds up with more obligations," said Robert Shireman, executive director of the Institute for College Access and Success and a former White House and U.S. Senate education policy adviser.

Department of Education data between 1995 and 2005 put the default rate of these dumped loans at about 34 percent. A department analyst, however, says that over the long-term life of these loans, the default rate could approach 60 percent.

Chiropractor Most Overrated Career

"Chiropractor" has been voted Most Overrated Career by U.S. News & World Report magazine for 2007:

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/biztech/articles/061218/18overrated.chiro.htm

Some chiropractors think their discipline can cure everything from headaches to sciatica, asthma to premenstrual syndrome. But the Federal Trade Commission only allows chiropractors to claim they can treat low back pain. And even so, research shows that mainstream treatments for lower back pain are equally effective. Many chiropractors also devote considerable time to marketing–in part to pay back the cost of chiropractic school, usually over $100,000.

Chiropractor works 2 jobs to chip away at $165,000 in school debt

Here's another recent newspaper feature showing what it's really like after you graduate from chiropractic college (with mountains of student loan debt):

Chiropractor works 2 jobs to chip away at $165,000 in school debt - from USA Today

http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/credit/2006-11-26-young-debt-schopp-profile_x.htm

The story is quite familiar to those of us taken in by the chiropractic promise of being a "successful doctor":

Yet despite her two jobs, she's still struggling to pay her living expenses and the minimum monthly payments on her student loan and credit card debts.

She's amassed nearly $165,000 in student loan debt from attending graduate school at Southern California University of Health Sciences in Whittier. She graduated in April 2005 with a degree in chiropractic health.

While at the university, she borrowed for tuition, books and living expenses. (The $165,000 she borrowed is just principal, not interest.) She also has about $9,000 in credit card debt and a $4,000 car loan.

There's even a video. You'll note that this woman is well-spoken, intelligent, and hard-working yet she still can't pay back her loans. The chiropractic colleges make wild claims about how much money you can make after graduation and often claim that chiropractors who can't pay back their loans are "losers". As this story shows, that is not the reality.

Meanwhile, check out this page called Student Debt Alert, which informs us that "nearly two-thirds of all four-year college graduates now have student loans" and "the number of students who graduate with over $25,000 in loan debt has tripled since the early 1990s":

Student Debt Alert: http://www.studentdebtalert.org/

Thanks to everyone who has supported the blog this year by sending me articles and your own personal "war stories". Thanks for linking to this site and for telling everyone the truth about chiropractic and student debt.

Before you take out student loans....

There have been so many new articles about STUDENT DEBT lately that I can hardly keep up. Here are some links that should be read by students considering loans.

In the case of CHIROPRACTIC student loans, I would recommend avoiding the whole career. For more information on this, please read www.chirobase.org and the ChiroTalk discussion list.

STUDENT DEBT ARTICLES:

Lesson for Students: The Best Debt Is None, Michelle Singletary in the Washington Post

Private student loans pose greater risk, USA Today

Students resort to private loans, staggering debt, San Francisco Chronicle

Project On Student Debt website - "For Americans of all socio-economic backgrounds, borrowing has become a primary way to pay for higher education. The Project on Student Debt works to increase public understanding of this trend and the implications for our families, economy, and society."

Student Loans Are For Suckers - op-ed piece by Ted Rall, archived on the Peace Corps website

Discussion thread about the "Student Loans Are for Suckers" piece

Knee-Deep In Debt, Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "With college loans and credit cards to pay off, many young women carry heavy load"

Student Loans: Leaving the Country

A reader of this blog contributed the following article.

Leaving the Country:

If you have students loans that are so high, it is a mathematically impossibility to pay back, you may have to leave the country.

Since the usury victim cannot go into bankruptcy:
1. Your wages will be garnished up to 25% for the rest of your life.
2. You cannot have a bank account since it can be seized.
3. You will have bad credit for the rest of your life, affecting both borrowing and employment.
4. You cannot own a decent car except a wreck, or real estate since it would be seized.
5. Limits on some licenses.
6. You cannot save for retirement since it can be seized.
7. Calls at work for payment for the rest of your life.

I have been following this for years, and it gets more and more draconian. There is even talk of taking driver licenses away of student loan usury victims. They are now taking part of people’s Social Security check. By the time you are old, they may take all of it.

What to do? Here are some ideas:

1. If you do not have a highly marketable skill like accounting or nursing, get one. How? Student loans of course. The Department of Education says if you get back on a payment plan, you can get more loans! Maybe run them up to the max since you can never pay it back anyway?

2. Move to a border city such as Detroit near Canada or San Diego near Mexico. This way you can have a bank account and own a decent car over the border.

3. The whole world is out there, visit escapeartist.com for info on living and working overseas. Its slogan is “Restarting your life overseas.”

4. Getting a visa to live in Canada is easy for those with marketable skills.

Read this about China: “The United States' insistence that students assume huge debts to pay for their college education is unusual enough that the Chinese government included it in its 2001 report of American human rights violations. Now, China is no shining light when it comes to human rights but they do have an excellent point in this instance: America forces its young adults to go into obscene amounts of debt.”

In Debt Before You Start

This is a good article that appeared a few months ago in USA Today, titled "In Debt Before You Start":

Click here for story

After years of rising college costs and shrinking financial aid, it's come to this: Some graduates are now leaving college with student-loan debt in the six figures.

Graduates with more than $100,000 in debt still account for a small subset of borrowers. But their numbers are rising. And the proportion who are leaving college with some level of unmanageable debt — debt they can't repay without significant hardship — is swelling.

In 2004, nearly 8% of graduating seniors carried student loans of $40,000 or more, according to the Project on Student Debt, a non-profit advocacy group. In 1993, even adjusted for inflation, only 1.3% of college seniors had debt that large, says Robert Shireman, director of the project.

About 11% of graduates of private, non-profit colleges have loans of $40,000 or more vs. 5.5% for public colleges and universities, Shireman says.

Accreditor Implicated in Chiropractic College Overutilization Scam, Faces Hearing with US Department of Education

The Council on Chiropractic Education (CCE), the professional accrediting body for every chiropractic professional school in the United States, has been summoned to an upcoming meeting of the U.S. Department of Education to answer questions regarding several unaddressed complaints which pertain to its renewal of recognition with the agency.

Washington, DC (PRWEB) May 18, 2006 -- The Council on Chiropractic Education (CCE), the sole accrediting body for all chiropractic schools in the United States, faces possible loss of recognition by the U.S. Department of Education (USDOE) arising from its handling of three open complaints pertaining to chiropractic schools accredited by the agency.

The first two complaints were filed in 2003 by the Council of New Jersey Chiropractors (CNJC) and Doctors for Excellence in Chiropractic Education (DECE). In the DECE complaint USDOE found that CCE failed to provide information requested by CNJC and had several conflicts of interest in its Board of Directors which had interfered with accreditation decisions. The outcome of the second complaint by CNJC has not yet been determined.

The third and most serious complaint was filed in 2004 by a 1996 graduate of the Life University College of Chiropractic named Allen Botnick from Plainfield, NJ. Dr. Botnick established that CCE violated USDOE accreditation requirements by not investigating his complaint in a fair and timely manner after nine months had passed without the agency taking action on a complaint pertaining to Life University in Marietta, Georgia. The complaint detailed numerous violations at the school including: the use of anti-medical propaganda in course texts, unapproved diagnosis procedures, exaggeration of the benefits of chiropractic care, overutilization of x-rays, inadequate clinical experiences, unqualified faculty and the promotion of unethical practice management procedures. After discovering the problems Dr. Botnick surrendered all chiropractic licenses. He refuses to practice, stating that his education did not teach him to identify and treat patient complaints in a safe, effective and ethical manner.

One particularly disturbing section of Botnick’s complaint describes three individuals at Life University who died as a result of ignoring obvious disease symptoms and shunning medical care. All three displayed unrealistic expectations for chiropractic care. The first student, Julian Ho, ignored a medical doctor's warning to seek medical treatment after showing signs of diabetes and later died as a result of the disease. Another student named Louis Menendez died from a heart attack arising from untreated heart disease. The final case involved a chiropractic technique instructor named John Grostic who died after ignoring a medical doctor's warning to seek treatment for a chronic cough which turned out to be due to metastatic lung cancer.

The Council on Chiropractic Education (CCE) initially refused to investigate Botnick's complaint, stating that they were prevented from doing so because of a sealed settlement made with the school following litigation in Federal Court.

Botnick complained that a brief filed in the Federal Court of Appeals (Council on Chiropractic Education, Inc., et al. v. Life University, Inc., U.S. Court of Appeals For the Eleventh Circuit, NO. 03-11020J) showed that CCE had known of the presence of many of the violations as early as 1992 yet took no action against the school until revoking its accreditation in 2002. USDOE found that CCE had indeed violated accreditation requirements by not addressing the complaint in a timely manner and ordered CCE to investigate it. CCE’s response to the agency indicated that the complaint was valid but claimed to have addressed it in accreditation proceedings. USDOE ordered CCE to provide documentation substantiating the corrections but CCE ignored the requests and the complaint remains unresolved.

The open complaints will be discussed at an open public hearing of the Accrediting Agency Evaluation Unit of the Office of Postsecondary Education at the U.S. Department of Education. The meeting will be used to formulate a recommendation to the Secretary of Education regarding whether or not the Council on Chiropractic Education should continue to be recognized.

If unsuccessful in its bid to gain continued recognition, CCE would be the second chiropractic educational body to lose recognition with USDOE. In 1993 the Straight Chiropractic Academic Standards Association (SCASA) lost recognition after Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander determined it to be an unreliable judge of the quality of education in its programs.

The meeting is scheduled for Tuesday June 6, 2006 at 8 a.m. EST at the Hilton Hotel located on 950 North Stafford Street in Arlington, Virginia. For more information, visit http://neck911usa.com/ .

Click here to read more about the upcoming U.S. Department of Education hearing

CBS News Story on Sallie Mae

CBS News recently did a story on Sallie Mae. Anyone involved with Sallie Mae -- or even considering getting involved -- should definitely read this story:

Sallie Mae's Success Too Costly?
Does The Lender's Success Come At Too Steep A Cost To Students And Taxpayers?

I have created a new links section (on the right hand side of this blog) to include information about Sallie Mae.