I haven't read what passed either, but one of the times I was listening to NPR during my commute last week, they were talking about reforming the federal student loan program.
What they said was that there are a lot of federal student loan programs that end up paying private banks to broker them. And of course, these banks want to be paid some amount for providing the service. They were talking about doing away with this system and having the government make the loans directly, cutting out the banks.
Like I said, I haven't looked at the bill so I don't know if this is what they actually did or not.
As I understand it (and I am il, so I could be wrong or uninformed), the loans administered by the Family Educational Loan Program (which is the target of this reform) will still be available to students. (These funds include Stafford, Plus, and federal consolidation loans). The only difference is that instead of the government giving money to Bank of America or whomever to give to you, they'll just give it directly to you, and toss the money saved by not going through a middleman into the Pell Grant kitty. Private loans (like from My Rich Uncle or whatever) will still be available, but will also still be credit-dependent. I actually don't recommend those, btw, if you can get money from anywhere else, they're viciously expensive.
Which is why I needed to do more digging on this, I haven't been able to pay more attention to what's been going on with all the health care reform crap lately, so seeing that the student loan "reform" got appended to the health care thing came as a bit of a shock this morning. :)
I guess I've gotten to the point where it's just easier to automatically assume that as I'm decently middle class, I'm gonna get screwed by whatever changes go through Congress. Filling out a FAFSA is usually a joke for me, I'm worried that there's some sub-paragraph in there that will make it become even more of a joke.
At the same time, I'm still hoping that I'll find a "Untraditional dudes that want to be nurses" grant or scholarship that hands out more than a pittance. :)
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What they said was that there are a lot of federal student loan programs that end up paying private banks to broker them. And of course, these banks want to be paid some amount for providing the service. They were talking about doing away with this system and having the government make the loans directly, cutting out the banks.
Like I said, I haven't looked at the bill so I don't know if this is what they actually did or not.
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I guess I've gotten to the point where it's just easier to automatically assume that as I'm decently middle class, I'm gonna get screwed by whatever changes go through Congress. Filling out a FAFSA is usually a joke for me, I'm worried that there's some sub-paragraph in there that will make it become even more of a joke.
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At the same time, I'm still hoping that I'll find a "Untraditional dudes that want to be nurses" grant or scholarship that hands out more than a pittance. :)
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