Time to pass the Student Loan Bill of Rights in Massachusetts
I was joined today by Ryan Powell, a UMASS Boston student and chapter chair of Mass Student PIRG to urge a State House Committee to pass S.160, An Act Establishing a Student Loan Bill of Rights, filed by Senator Lesser. The bill will protect student loan borrowers from unfair, predatory, and deceptive practices of student lending and loan servicing companies. Read our testimony below.
July 8, 2019
Senator Paul Feeney, Chairman
Representative Tackey Chan, Chairman
Senator James Welch, Vice Chairman
Representative Jay Livingstone, Vice-Chairwoman
Members of the Joint Committee on Consumer Protection and Professional Licensure
Fr: Deirdre Cummings, MASSPIRG Legislative Director
[email protected], 617-747-4319
Ryan Powell, student at UMass – Boston, Chapter Chair for MASSPIRG Students, [email protected]
508-395-0919
Testimony in Support of S.160, An Act Establishing a Student Loan Bill of Rights
MASSPIRG along with our sister organization Massachusetts Student PIRG urge you to support S.160, An Act Establishing a Student Loan Bill of Rights, filed by Senator Lesser. This bill protects student loan borrowers from unfair, predatory, and deceptive practices of student lending and loan servicing companies. There is a similar bill, H. 998 filed by Representative Natalie Higgins, which was sent to the Financial Services Committee. The bills have 36 cosponsors.
MASSPIRG is one of the state’s leading consumer advocacy organizations working to protecting consumers for 45 years. We are a non-profit, not partisan member supported organization working with USPIRG our national affiliate and Massachusetts Student PIRG who has 12 college chapters at schools from the Berkshires to the South Shore.
The cost of college tuition has skyrocketed and ever-increasing numbers of students and their families are driven to seek student loans to pay for it. Data collected by The Institute for College Access and Success (TICAS) shows that in Massachusetts last year, nearly two-thirds of students in an undergraduate program graduated with student debt. This debt amounted to $32,000 thousand dollars per student on average. Consequently, Massachusetts students have the 7th highest average student debt in the nation, according to TICAS. The level of debt is also skyrocketing, according to the Student Borrower Protection Center, student debt in Massachusetts has shot up 107% in the 10 years between 2007 and 2017. In Massachusetts we have 855,500 student loan borrowers with a collective $33 billion in outstanding debt. Nationally, there is $1.6 trillion in outstanding student loan debt.
Some student loan servicers take advantage of student borrowers by using predatory lending methods that are illegal or unfair, charging exorbitant fees, misrepresenting their products to students, botching paper work, failing to properly process paper work or misleading them into opting for more expensive options. Further, servicers often fail to inform or properly administer income- based repayment options or programs to relieve debt in exchange for working on public service – a program borrowers are legally entitled to. When students can’t pay, they may threaten, coerce or harass the borrowers. According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), almost two-thirds of the complaints filed by student borrowers last year were related to problems with loan servicing.
Despite the size of this industry, the history of complaints, and the massive size of both the debt and number of borrowers – we have very little consumer protections in place. In fact, under the current Federal Administration, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has significantly reduced their oversight and role in this area, leaving borrowers vulnerable and without necessary protection from the unfair practices by the loan servicers exposed by the CFPB.
S.160 will protect student borrowers by requiring the Division of Banks to license all student loan servicers, holding them accountable for deceptive practices under state law. The bill establishes a Student Loan Ombudsman office who will receive, review, and assist in resolving complaints. This office will be critical in spotting and evaluating unfair and deceptive trends and practices enabling regulators to end the practice and to protect borrowers. The bill also allows the Division of Banks to conduct investigations and examinations of practices.
Similar bills have been passed in CO, CT, CA, IL, MD, ME, NY, WA and Washington D.C., and NJ and RI Legislatures have passed bills and are awaiting final approval from their Governors.
Now more than ever, it is critical that we defend our students from unscrupulous loan servicers. The need for state oversight could not be more urgent. Please support S.160.
Authors
Deirdre Cummings
Legislative Director, MASSPIRG
Deirdre runs MASSPIRG’s public health, consumer protection and tax and budget programs. Deirdre has led campaigns to improve public records law and require all state spending to be transparent and available on an easy-to-use website, close $400 million in corporate tax loopholes, protect the state’s retail sales laws to reduce overcharges and preserve price disclosures, reduce costs of health insurance and prescription drugs, and more. Deirdre also oversees a Consumer Action Center in Weymouth, Mass., which has mediated 17,000 complaints and returned $4 million to Massachusetts consumers since 1989. Deirdre currently resides in Maynard, Mass., with her family. Over the years she has visited all but one of the state's 351 towns — Gosnold.
