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Blind Man • 16 years ago

You cherry pick, comparing apples and oranges, then try to convince everyone you have created ambrosia, when it is really another sorrowful session of grinding axes. We all get your bias.
Yoy said it best, you "choose" your facts, but even an analysis of your latest post doesn't hold up. Maybe, you should stick to facts. Amusement is a two edged...axe?

finaidfollies • 16 years ago

...but I doubt it.
You can cite '95%' of schools on the list, and be pointing to the mom and pop career schools. I choose to point, as I did in my first post, instead to the Indiana Universities, the Universities of Findlays, the other expensive schools on the list lured out of DL to FFELP, whose volume dwarfs the schools you use to build vacuous percentages.
The high-cost schools are the best mining grounds for that holy grail of lenders, high average borrower indebtedness (ABI). The opportunity funds paid to these schools reached hundreds of thousands, and at least in the case of IU, millions of dollars. Some mirage.
Keep writing, Blind Man. The amusement is mine, and of fellow IHE readers.

DS • 16 years ago

First the Department of Ed, as a kneejerk reaction to the political embarrassment of having the whole loan mess happen under their watch (or more accurately, lack thereof), issues regulations for a law that hasn't even been passed yet. Now before they write the final regulations, to regulate a law that doesn't exist yet, they decide to enforce these regulations retroactively.
Ms. Spellings, Mr. Cuomo beat you to the punch, and there's nothing you can do to change that, including taking it out on colleges via program reviews or other scare tactics. Once Congress has passed a law and your boss has signed it (but not before), issue regs and then move forward. Schools will work with you and change what needs to be changed. In the meantime, those of us on college campuses would like to get back to helping students instead of meeting with attorneys.

Guilty by Perception • 16 years ago

The entire premise of 80% of loan volume is misleading. The data used by the Dept to get that number is the percentage of unique loans with a given lender as opposed to the percentage of unique students with a lender. If a student has more than one loan with a lender - it is being included in data to arrive at > 80%. Schools with higher percentages of graduate students, independent students, or a high population of summer school attendees are having their perceived lack of choice in lenders artificially increased by using individual loan applications as opposed to individual students. A school with > 80% of individual loan applications through a lender will not have that high of a percentage of unique students through a given lender. The Department should have used unique borrowers with a particular lender as opposed to number of loans with a particular lender.

Blind Man • 16 years ago

Who cares about the department of educations review? It wont be until Cuomo weighs in that these schools will ever feel safe again.
Here goes follies again, seeing mirages in the thin air in folly land. We must not be looking at the same list. 95% of the schools listed in this article do not even have graduate programs much less school as lender programs.
Perhaps the pangs are really peels of amusement.

finaidfollies • 16 years ago

Looking at that list, I see a lot of schools that recently came out of the Direct program and into FFELP. They were lured by borrower benefits not available in the FDSLP. So, at least in part, the list above is an index of school dissatisfaction with the Direct Program.
Oh, yes, the schools also made money on their school-as-lender program for grad students. But the career schools, the CC's--either the FAO genuinely wanted to help students with more affordable loans, or they wanted to salve the wounded wallets of students. For these school types, there's just not that much money on the table.
Maybe schools feel better offering lower cost loans, so that cost increases don't cause guilt pangs quite so intensely.