It’s easy to get student loans thanks to the aptly named “Parent Plus” program, a subprime loan trap that ensnares parents plus their college-age children. The program was enacted by Congress in the 1980s, but president Obama promoted it heavily.
The results speak for themselves: Nearly 40% of the loans are subprime. The default rate exceeds the rate for U.S. mortgages at the peak of the housing crisis.
Kids graduate from college with useless degrees, plus parents and kids are stuck with massive bills that cannot be paid back.
It’s Easy for Parents to Get College Loans—Repaying Them Is Another Story.
Student loans made through parents come from an Education Department program called Parent Plus, which has loans outstanding to more than three million Americans. The problem is the government asks almost nothing about its borrowers’ incomes, existing debts, savings, credit scores or ability to repay. Then it extends loans that are nearly impossible to extinguish in bankruptcy if borrowers fall on hard times.
As of September 2015, more than 330,000 people, or 11% of borrowers, had gone at least a year without making a payment on a Parent Plus loan, according to the Government Accountability Office. That exceeds the default rate on U.S. mortgages at the peak of the housing crisis. More recent Education Department data show another 180,000 of the loans were at least a month delinquent as of May 2016.
“This credit is being extended on terms that specifically, willfully ignore their ability to repay,” says Toby Merrill of Harvard Law School’s Legal Services Center. “You can’t avoid that we’re targeting high-cost, high-dollar-amount loans to people who we know can’t afford to repay them.”
The number of Americans with federal student loans, including through programs for undergraduates, parents and graduate students, grew by 14 million to 42 million in the decade through last year. Overall student debt, most of it issued by the federal government, more than doubled to $1.3 trillion over that period.
The financing fueled a surge in college enrollment. Between 2005 and 2010, enrollment grew 20%, the biggest increase since the 1970s. The Obama administration supported such lending in an effort to widen access to college education.
Nearly four in 10 student loans—the vast majority of them federal ones—went to borrowers with credit scores below the subprime threshold of 620, indicating they were at the highest risk of defaulting, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from credit-rating firm Equifax Inc. That figure excludes borrowers, such as many 18-year-old freshmen, who lacked scores because of shallow credit histories. By comparison, subprime mortgages peaked at nearly 20% of all mortgage originations in 2006.
Roughly eight million Americans owing $137 billion are at least 360 days delinquent on federal student loans, nearly the number of homeowners who lost their homes because of the housing crisis. More than three million others owing $88 billion have fallen at least a month behind or have been granted temporary reprieves on payments because of financial distress.
Joint Effort
In 2005, president Bush signed the bankruptcy reform act of 2005 making student loans not dischargeable in bankruptcy.
President Obama came along next and encouraged parents who had no idea what they were getting into to sign loans to put their kids through college.
Parents plus their kids are mired in debt that cannot be paid back. Thank you Congress, President Bush, and President Obama.
Surefire Way to Discharge the Loans
There is one way to get rid of these loans. Die.
Stop the Madness
Wherever government meddles, costs rise dramatically.
The solution is to stop the meddling: Stop all the loan programs, stop all the aid programs, stop insisting that everyone needs to go to college, and start accrediting programs and course offerings from places like the Khan Academy.
Not a single student aid program aided any students. Rather, escalating costs went to teachers, administrators, and their pensions as student debt piled sky high.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
