Obama Administration to Revamp How Education Department Collects Student Loans
They’re going to make it easier for students to pay back the government. Who benefits most from that?
Inside Higher Ed reports.
Revamped Loan Payment System
The U.S. Department of Education plans to revamp how it collects monthly payments from millions of Americans who have federal student loans, the department will announce on Monday afternoon.
Department officials will announce their plans to change how the loan servicing companies they hire go about collecting payments from federal student loan borrowers.
Federal student loan borrowers currently make payments to one of several loan servicing firms that contract with the Education Department. The four major loan servicers are Navient, Great Lakes Educational Loan Services Inc., Nelnet and the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency, which operates under the brand FedLoan Servicing.
Under the department’s new system, borrowers will log on to a single Education Department web portal to make loan payments instead of navigating various loan servicers’ websites. And the contracted loan servicing companies will have to use Education Department branding — rather than their own logos — when communicating with loan borrowers.
The goal for borrowers is to eliminate “the need to know the name of their servicer,” Under Secretary of Education Ted Mitchell said in a blog post on Monday.
The Education Department also plans to be more prescriptive about how the loan servicing companies it hires must interact with federal loan borrowers, a department official said. That includes providing more uniform, standardized information about how borrowers can enroll in government benefits like income-based repayment programs.
Mitchell said in the blog post that the “goal is to build a new state-of-the-art loan servicing system — one that creates incentives and guidelines that support a more user-friendly single online loan management platform with high-quality, one-on-one customer service that provides the help and guidance borrowers need when they have questions or their circumstances change.”
Obama administration plans to revamp how Education Department collects student loans (Inside Higher Ed | News)
Comments
Bet that’ll go as well as the Obamacare website. What a joke ~
Get the feds out of the loan and education business. There is no authority to do any of it. Once the gov controls everything, there will be no rights left to protect. Welcome to serfdom.
Get the feds out of the loan business, out of the education business – yes. Also, eliminate the mad race for credentialism by allowing employers to administer aptitude tests as a screening tool for employment. Demand that K-12 be rigorous so a high school diploma will actually mean something once again, and eliminate compulsory education. Promote trade schools, voc ed, and apprenticeships so we don’t have to perpetuate the farce that all kids need/want/must go to college to have a decent job (quit using colleges/universities as glorified and very expensive job-training programs).
That’ll do for a start ~