Find Your Federal Student Loans

Have you just graduated from college?  Hurrah!  Congratulations.  Now....did you have to pay for that diploma in federal loans?  If you answered yes....do you know where those federal loans are and who you pay?   The financial aid office might have orchestrated all the paperwork for you, but it's your responsibility to actually pay back the loans.  Below is a list of contact numbers and websites I used to track down all my federal student loans.  Good luck and happy loan hunting! 



Toll-Free Federal Loan Locator Hotline    1-800-433-3243
This number (1-800-433-3243) allows you access to a database that keeps track of all federal education loans ever taken out under your name and social security number.  Here you can learn:

• how many loans you have and what lenders they are at
• phone contact info for most lenders
• how much you initially took the loan out for
• how much you have left to pay back on the loan
• what type of loans you have

The National Student Loan Data System
www.nslds.ed.gov
The National Student Loan Data System (www.nslds.ed.gov) keeps track of the current balances all your federal student grants and loans (Stafford, Perkins, Pell, Smart, etc).   To log in, click on Financial Aid Review.

Screen-cap of NSLDS highlighting the Financial Aid Review tab

  
You will be led through several screens that announces you will be asked for private information and details how this information will be secured on an internet connection.  To log-in, you will be prompted for

• your social security number
• your birthday
• the first two letters of your last name
• your federal PIN number from your FAFSA 
• to get a new PIN or reset a lost PIN, visit www.pin.ed.gov  Please note it will take several days to get a PIN--plan accordingly!

www.federalstudentaid.ed.gov
www.federalstudentaid.ed.gov is a basic informational website on federal student loans for students (pre-college, during college, and after college), parents, schools, and lenders.  You can get to NSLDS from here.


Sallie Mae   
1-888-272-5543
www.salliemae.com 
Sallie Mae is one of the big loan lenders.  Even if you don't take out private loans, you might run into them if they handle your federal loans.  They handle Stafford loans, as well as some Department of Education loans.  Call them up and ask questions---the balance you have with Sallie Mae might be different from the amount of loans they can actually handle for you.  For example, you might have $15,000 through Sallie Mae and $5,000 through the Department of Education. When you call up Sallie Mae and get a balance over the phone, they will only tell you of the $15,000.  BUT, you can actually pay off the $5,000 Deptartment of Education loan through the same Sallie Mae representative that takes care of your payments on the $15,000 loan.  This is a general summary of what I learned with my loans--ask questions to find out what pertains to your loan situation because it is probably different.

www.SallieMae.com allows you to sign up and manage your loans online under the tab "Manage your loans"

Screen-cap of SallieMae.com with the Manage Your Loans online log-in area highlighted

Oberlin Perkins Loans
Karla Sanderson at Oberlin College keeps track of these things and is very helpful. 

Accreditation Helps Student Loan Plundering

 Time and again I’ve highlighted the immense frauds going on in our community colleges; the top-down set up of these places, combined with lack of oversight, really makes it easy for the plundering to go on hand-over-fist here.

     “Lack of oversight” isn’t exactly accurate. There’s this thing called “accreditation” that is supposed to make sure schools are legit. Alas, accreditation is pretty much in on the scam nowadays, and, being run by the same people that run the schools, generally won’t shut down a school no matter openly fraudulently the school is run. 

     There is also a Board of Trustees that’s supposed to oversee the school’s spending, to make sure it’s done responsibly. All too often, there’s a quid pro quo arrangement between the “trustees” and the administration of the school to split the plunder as much as possible, although shared governance with the faculty (you know, actual educators) usually slows that down. Not all community colleges have shared governance, which is why they’re so prone to plundering.

     Some time back I highlighted a rarity in higher education: a school losing accreditation. City College of San Francisco was threatened with having its accreditation removed, but not for fraud, or for anything relating to education—because, hey, accreditation really has nothing to do with education. Instead, the issue was the school was operating far too legitimately, with shared governance, and, I’m serious, not enough administrators. Yes, insufficient administration was cited by the accreditor as a problem, even though the school was running fairly well for a community college.

     The Federal government stepped in and pointed out that the committee removing accreditation didn’t have much in the way of faculty on it (just administrators, bitter over the plunder they weren’t claiming), and asked the accreditor, ACCJC, to make some more reasonable complaints, or else.

      ACCJC made some demands, and the community college gave in to the accreditor, making changes:

Because of ACCJC sanctions, shared governance was dismantled and the elected Board of Trustees was removed from power. A "Special Trustee With Extraordinary Powers" was installed who could do as he wished in the name of efficient operation.
ACCJC's critique and its sanctions were the impetus for the installation of a revolutionary new reign of new Administrators.

     So, instead of a fairly reasonable system designed to help students and provide the education taxpayers were paying for, a new system without checks and balances, and a new band of administrators, moved in. What, pray tell, do the new accreditation-approved administrators do?

     Commence to plundering:

City College of S.F. splurges on administrators’ travel, meals

     That’s right, the new Poo Bah goes on fabulous junkets to China, Taiwan, Viet Nam, and eating whatever he wants for free (and these guys’ eating habits are positively royal, as I’ve shown a time or two in this blog). I really want to point out: this is a community college Poo Bah…he has no business traveling all over the world on the college’s expense account, which is probably why he can provide no records explaining the purpose of the trip. Administration provides a laughable excuse:

“…without required records about the purpose of the trip. College officials said the trip was to recruit foreign students but couldn't say whether any enrolled as a result.”

     Do the citizens of San Francisco honestly want to pay for a community college to help educate Vietnamese, Chinese, and Taiwanese kids in those countries? Seriously? This is the lie admin wants people to believe.

City College of San Francisco has spent thousands of dollars on fancy restaurants and international and cross-country travel for two top administrators — often with no record of what the expenses were for — since the school’s successful campaign in 2013 for a parcel tax to help save the college from bankruptcy, records show.

     Anyway, the Poo Bah at any institution doesn’t just “up and go” with nobody noticing. I grant that these guys are irrelevant to education, and this particular Poo Bah certainly proves it, by being gone for so much and yet the school still ran fine. In any event, he had to have provided, in advance, notice that he was disappearing for a while. In theory, the Poo Bah’s boss is the Board of Trustees…one that was placed there with influence from the accreditor.

     I’ve often insinuated that accreditation is in on the scam, and certainly I’ve seen and shown numerous cases where accreditors clearly looked the other way while institutional fraud was being committed. However, simply looking the other way is one level of facilitation, but this case is different, as accreditors ripped out a legitimate system, and helped to install a fraudulent system.

     What then, does this accreditor-approved Board have to say about this plundering? Let’s see:

Rafael Mandelman, president of the City College Board of Trustees, told the San Francisco Chronicle that the district started an investigation after the newspaper started looking into the issue.

     I ask the gentle reader to read between the lines. The president here knew full well the Poo Bah was traveling all over the world on highly questionable trips, but he had no problem with it until, and this is key, after the newspaper started looking into the issue.

     It’s a safe bet, then, that all sorts of plundering is going on at CCSF now, plundering that will continue unabated unless it makes the newspapers. Now, the Poo Bah being gone for a month or two was easy enough for our media to notice…the gentle reader needs to understand there are many, many frauds going on that media will never figure out and, as the president of the Board of Trustees admits, such frauds will never be stopped by the board, or even officially noticed, until it hits the papers.

      And the accreditor is on the record now, stating that schools which don’t use this pro-fraud system will risk losing accreditation. How does one consider this, and not deem that accreditors are part of the fraud of higher education today?

Federal Borrowing to Fund Student Loans

How much does has the U.S. federal government cumulatively borrowed in order to loan money to U.S. students?

Would you believe the answer is nearly $1 trillion dollars?

From January 2009 through October 2015, the U.S. government has borrowed over $820 billion to fund its Federal Direct Student Loan Program, with the cumulative amount sitting at $964 billion as of the end of October 2015. Over that same time, the total U.S. national debt had increased by $7.5 trillion, which means that over one out of every ten dollars that the U.S. government has borrowed since President Obama was sworn into office has gone to fund student loans.

Meanwhile, since 2009, the U.S. student loan default rate has ranged between 11.8% to 14.7%, which is to say that over one out of every eight federal government-funded student loans are not being paid back according to their contractual terms.

U.S. News and World Report's Student Loan Ranger weighs in on the federal government's student debt problems:

Despite an increase in the use and awareness of options such as the income-driven repayment plans, 11.6 percent of student loan borrowers had loans 90 days​ or more past due during the last quarter, which ended at the end of September. That's higher than the delinquency rate for car loans, mortgages and even credit cards.
Meanwhile, the overall student loan debt balance increased by $13 billion in the same time frame – bringing outstanding student debt balances in this country to $1.2 ​trillion. To put that in perspective, credit card debt increased $11 billion in the same period to a total of $714 billion, and there's $1.05 trillion in outstanding auto loans – but only 3.4 percent of auto loans are 90 days or more past due.
A footnote reminds readers that these student loan delinquency numbers don't take into account the fact that up to half of the loans in "good standing" are likely not in repayment at all but are postponed because the borrowers are still in or recently separated from school, or are temporarily putting off payment. This means that delinquency rates actually could be twice as high.

Doing some quick back of the envelope math, as of September 2015, the U.S. government's Federal Direct Student Loan program now accounts for 79% of all outstanding student loans in the United States.

The Problem Isn't Student Loans--It's Higher Education

Forgiving skyrocketing student debt won't solve the real problem, which is the soaring costs imposed by a cartel that is failing to prepare students for the economy of tomorrow.

Everyone understands soaring student debt is a problem: burdened with $1.3 trillion in student loans, young people are unable to start businesses, buy homes and start families. The high cost of housing and meeting regulations to launch businesses add additional burdens, but the weight of $1.3 trillion in debt right out of the starting gate is crushing.

The "solution" being pursued by the federal government is obvious: take over most of the student debt and then eventually bury it in the zombie-loan graveyard (i.e. defaults are ignored but the debt isn't officially written off), write it down via forgiveness programs, or some other mechanism to reduce the burden.

If this wasn't the plan, then why has federal ownership of student loan debt skyrocketed from zero to $900 billion in a few short years?

This is a decades-old problem that's finally reaching critical mass: student debt has leaped from less than $500 billion in 2006 to $1.3 trillion today, a mere 9 years later:

The problem isn't student loans--it's the explosive rise in the costs of higher education. This chart depicts the exponential rise of higher education costs:

Apologists claim the student-loan crisis is the result of underfunding of colleges by states. While it's true that some of the cost burden has been shifted from taxpayers to students, the real problem is soaring costs of the higher education cartel, which fixes prices via the artifical scarcity of accreditation.

The extraordinary rise in administrative staffing and costs and the boom in building costly temples of higher education are well-known. This chart depicts the rise of the educrat class, at the expense of teachers/professors:

I cover the rise in costs and the the equally extraordinary failure of the higher education cartel to prepare students for work in the emerging economy in my book The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy: The Revolution in Higher Education.

So the problem is two-fold: it isn't just the insane cost of higher education that's the issue; the cartel is failing to prepare students for an economy that requires the 8 essential skills in addition to whatever technical skills are needed in a particular field.

In all, from 1987 until 2011-12--the most recent academic year for which comparable figures are available—universities and colleges collectively added 517,636 administrators and professional employees, according to the analysis by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting.

“There’s just a mind-boggling amount of money per student that’s being spent on administration,” said Andrew Gillen, a senior researcher at the institutes. “It raises a question of priorities.”

The ratio of nonacademic employees to faculty has also doubled. There are now two nonacademic employees at public and two and a half at private universities and colleges for every one full-time, tenure-track member of the faculty.

The number of employees in central system offices has increased six-fold since 1987, and the number of administrators in them by a factor of more than 34.

Paying a bloated institution for the privilege of sitting through four years of lectures, online courses and a few labs no longer makes sense for the vast majority of students. What makes sense is dispensing with the entire bureaucracy of the cartel and costly campuses altogether, and designing directed apprenticeships which combine the best of online coursework with on-the-job training in workplaces.

The top research universities (numbering around 125 out of thousands of colleges and universities) can continue to train the relatively small cadre of academics and researchers the economy can support. (Just issuing STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) degrees doesn't magically create jobs for the graduates.)

The vast majority of student are better served by mastering the 8 essential skills required in the emerging economy--skills that students can acquire on their own, a process of accrediting yourself that I address in detail in Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.

Forgiving skyrocketing student debt won't solve the real problem which is the soaring costs imposed by a cartel that is failing to prepare students for the economy of tomorrow.

Your Student Loans Will Affect Your Credit Score

Student loans are a form of debt, which means having one will affect your credit score. Of course, it's pretty hard to get through school without one.

If you're worried about the impact a student loan could have on your credit, know that how you handle it will determine whether that effect is positive or negative.

How a Credit Score is Calculated

Your credit score is an extremely important number. As a soon-to-be or recent college grad, your credit score will play a huge role in your financial future. Basically, it gives lenders and creditors an idea of how financially responsible you are--how heavily you rely on credit and whether you pay bills on time, for example--and helps them judge the level of risk you present as a borrower.

Your credit score will play into how easily you can obtain credit cards, loans and even an apartment, so taking care of it now will save you a lot of grief in the future. Here's a breakdown of how your score is calculated:

• Payment History: Your ability to consistently pay bills on time makes up 35 percent of your score.
• Amount Owed: Coming in at a close second, the amount of debt you owe is 30 percent.
• Credit History: At 15 percent, the length of time you've been using credit is also considered.
• New Credit: 10 percent of your credit score is reliant upon how often you open up new lines of credit.
• Types of Credit: Also at 10 percent, the varied types of credit you possess (credit card, student loan, auto loan, etc.) will affect your score.

How Student Loans Affect Credit

As you can see, any type of loan, including a student loan, will influence all the above factors in some way. However, a student loan can be a good thing or a bad thing, sometimes both, when it comes to your credit.

Positive Influence Student Loans Have on Credit

Making your student loan payments in full and on time each month is the best thing you can do for your credit score. Doing so will give it a big boost. Additionally, a loan will help to establish a credit history if you didn't have one previously and aid in varying the types of credit you possess.

Negative Influence Student Loans Have on Credit

On the other hand, missing payments can hit your credit hard. If you borrow more than you can afford, your credit score will likely reflect that fact when you fail to pay back your debt on time. Additionally, the loan will significantly increase your outstanding debt (the amount you owe) until it's paid off. Finally, if you continue to obtain new loans over time, it could hurt your "new credit" percentage.

Of course, if your parents are the ones acquiring loans to help pay your tuition, it is their credit score that will be affected, not yours. Your credit will only come into play if these loans are in your name. Instead, consider opening the loan in your name and have their contributions regularly go toward paying the loan off.

Even if your parents have already saved money for your education, a student loan in your name will also help to build your credit. Many student loans defer interest until after you're out of school, so you can accumulate 4 years of regular payments on your credit file without paying more than the actual cost. However, make sure Mom and Dad are reliable and have a steady source of income, or you'll be stuck with the bill and possible damage to your credit.

Overall, if you can get a student loan on your own, the long-term effect will be positive as long as you pay it back on time. You may see a dip in your score at first, but in the long run, a student loan can actually do great things to establish and build solid credit.

Student Loans and the Next Crisis

These are boom times for student debt. Now 10 percent of all household debt, it has nearly doubled in the past five years. That growth comes entirely from new lending by the federal government.



Recent federal efforts to shut down for-profit colleges, a major source of demand for student loans, may not be enough. The federal takeover of the student-loan industry in 2010 was a shock to the supply of student loans, just like the boom in private securitization was to residential mortgages during the 2000s. We have seen this movie before. If the government is to prevent either another debt-driven economic downturn or large write-offs at the taxpayer's expense, the supply of student loans must pull back.

This will be difficult, and not only because students are a sympathetic bunch. The more meaningful obstacle will be government itself. If the Fed is to regulate the supply of student loans -- which, since the financial crisis, is responsible for such regulation -- it will have to knock on the Department of Education's door. And the Department of Education doesn't think of itself as a source of macroeconomic risk, even though it should.

The worry is that government does this sort of self-regulation badly. Think of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which enjoyed government backing in the boom and then imploded in the bust. A more apt analogy may be the many developing countries where the state and state-run institutions are a large and direct source of credit and not merely of loan guarantees, as were Fannie and Freddie.

Without careful thought to the design of institutions, state-run lending has a tendency toward unpleasant endings. Inattentive to risk, the government starts a credit boom. It then fails to rein it in, because prudence never attracts a political constituency. When the bust comes, government faces an unattractive choice: It can forgive debts at great cost to taxpayers, or it can leave the borrowers saddled and plunge the economy deeper into distress.

Why are student loans a danger? More than a third of young families now have student debt and carry a median balance of $17,000, according to the 2013 Survey of Consumer Finances, up from a fifth of households with a median balance of $10,000. Those with bachelor's degrees pay 6.5 percent of their annual income in student-debt service. Student loans surpassed auto loans as a source of debt in 2010, but it remains less than mortgages. And delinquency rates are up. If the level of student debt does not make it major risk today, its explosive growth guarantees it will be in a few years.

The good news, say the defenders of the student-loan boom, is that government does not face any credit risk. They are correct in that student loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy but wrong in a more substantive sense. If student-loan defaults were to soar, they would be the first ones calling for government to forgive the loans so that the economy avoids a recession. So the option of collecting on federally-owned student debt via the tax system -- the final recourse that the government has -- may not be a viable one if the debt boom continues.

A stronger defense is that young people are swapping student debt for other forms of debt, such as auto loans and mortgages. In fact, more detailed data from the Survey of Consumer Finances show that debt burdens for young households are down since 2010. Those with student debts also tend to be pretty well off -- for the most part, they have college degrees -- and so maybe they can handle it. Yet much of the decline in home and auto loans is cyclical. It's not clear whether the growth in student loans will look so much like a "swap" when these other forms of borrowing return.

Better to get the institutions right, then, when we can. To its credit, the Obama administration has worked hard to establish rules that prevent the government from financing educations at institutions that don't improve their students' job prospects. Yet these rules are "microprudential," in the regulatory terminology that has so far been limited to banks. Student lending is fast becoming a macroprudential concern.

Law School Graduates a float in Student Loan Debt

The yank Bar Association has return vulnerable for the manner it permits law faculties to report post-graduation employment rates. Some recent school of law graduates charge that they have been fraudulently induced to pay tens or many thousands of greenbacks on law degrees that haven't resulted in paid employment as associate degree professional person or maybe in any position that may enable these graduates to create the minimum payments on their law graduate loans. 

Some graduates complain that they've massed $200,000 or a lot of in debt from student loans in pursuit of Juris doctor's degree degrees, operative below the belief that their alma mater's post-graduation employment rates were sufficiently high to permit them to seek out work when graduation. 

One law school datum repeatedly being known as into question is that the nine-month employment rate. The ABA has perpetually allowed law school to count any employment, whether or not or not it needs a degree or is even relevant to the sector of law, toward a school's post-graduation employment proportion. 

Under this kind of accounting, school of law graduates World Health Organization, 9 months when graduation, square measure creating minimum hourly wage as servers at Chili's or cashiers at Target square measure enclosed in their law school's proportion of "employed" graduates. 

Another problem? Reported beginning salaries for freshly graduated attorneys seem to be hyper inflated. 

This alleged puffery shows up in surveys just like the ones printed by U.S. News & World Report, that compares law faculties round the country and ranks them per tiers. The beginning earnings figures reported by the highest-ranked law faculties like Yale and Harvard square measure recurrent among law faculties within the second- and third-tiers of the survey, even though these figures do not mirror the particular average beginning salaries of the lower-tier schools' graduates. 

Students comfortable by those reported employment rates and beginning salaries assume it's definitely worth the immediate debt load to require on each federal graduate loans and non-federal personal student loans to hide the value of school of law -- debt that presumptively are going to be paid back from the bound paychecks to come back with a six-figure attorney's earnings -- solely to seek out when graduation that there square measure few, if any, jobs accessible within the legal community at once.