5 Tips for Reporting on Student Loan Debt After the Pandemic Pause
Get advice and ideas to localize stories that go beyond covering federal student loans.
The planned early 2022 restart of federal student loan payments will renew the nation’s attention to the approximately 42 million Americans who owe an estimated $1.6 trillion in education debt.
Reporters can find fresh angles and new information to help borrowers by pursuing accountability stories, and by paying particular attention to debt repayment, forgiveness and collections of overdue balances, three veteran reporters said at the Education Writers Association’s 2021 Higher Education Seminar.
Reporters should also consider expanding their research beyond the standard federal student loans to examine parent loans, as well as other education-related debts, such as unpaid tuition bills, advised journalists Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, Meredith Kolodner and Josh Mitchell.
The journalists suggested five strategies to break new stories:
-
Follow up on promises to help borrowers. The
federal government has sometimes failed to come through on its
promises to, for example, forgive debts of
public servants or those who were cheated by their colleges
– The Washington Post’s Douglas-Gabriel said. That story
can be told at the local level through borrowers in the
community. “Hold these programs and these people accountable to
ensure that the folks who say that they’re going to help are
actually giving help,” she said. The federal
public service forgiveness program is ripe for more
coverage, especially given its recent expansion. “I would
really encourage folks to identify a couple of teachers or
police officers in your area who have been working toward
this,” she said. “I assure you, people in public service loan
forgiveness are very chatty. They’re willing to talk about why
this hasn’t worked for them, and they will give you
documents.”
-
Look beyond federal student loans: Even in the
pandemic-affected academic year of 2020-21, Americans took out
more than $22 billion in education debt outside of the federal
student loan program. Americans took out approximately $12
billion in education loans from banks, credit unions, or other
non-federal lenders last year. And approximately 561,000
parents of undergraduates took out a total of about $10 billion
in federal parent PLUS loans – accounting for
one quarter of all federal education lending for undergraduates
last year. On top of all those debts, one
study found that as many as 6.6 million students had unpaid
tuition bills totaling about $15 billion. All debt
delinquencies cause problems for the debtors, but unpaid
tuition bills have the added complication of halting the
students’ education, since colleges typically refuse to
re-enroll or release transcripts to students with arrearages.
Mitchell, a Wall Street Journal reporter and author of a book
on student loans called “The
Debt Trap,” noted that certain colleges seem to have
disproportionate levels of certain kinds of debts. Some of
Alabama’s public universities, for example, have above-average
rates of parent borrowing. (Nationally, only about 3% of
families of undergraduates take out parent PLUS loans. But at
the University of Alabama, the rate is about 9%.) Reporters can
check the number of parent PLUS borrowers and the amount they
borrow each year at each school using data on the Federal
Student Aid website. Since the parent, private and college
loans have much less flexible repayment and forgiveness
options, reporters should keep an eye out for stories on how
borrowers will manage to repay them, the panelists
suggested.
-
Investigate collections: The tactics lenders
use to collect overdue debts are also undercovered. Kolodner, a
Hechinger Report journalist, investigated the
New York attorney general’s aggressive collections strategy
against students late on tuition payments and the activities of
collection agencies. She found the collection fees
sometimes boosted the amount students owed by up to 40%.
Reporters can examine how effective the collection strategies
are by requesting data on the total amount owed over a given
period and the amount paid back during that same time. “You
have to be a little careful because some of the debt will be
from previous years, so they’re not just collecting the debt
that was incurred that year,” Kolodner warned. “But if you do
it over a period of years, you can get a rough percentage.” She
recommended reporters connect with lawyers who represent
debtors, such as legal aid organizations, for help finding
lawsuits. Douglas-Gabriel added that state consumer protection
agencies and attorneys general also often keep files on
consumers’ loan complaints.
-
Ask who benefits: It’s important to
investigate who’s making money from student loans, Mitchell
said. His book traced the transition of Sallie Mae from a
quasi-governmental agency (technically, a “government-sponsored
enterprise”) to a lucrative for-profit company, for example.
Besides private lenders, such as traditional banks, and
upstarts, such as SoFi, there are many other money-making
niches in the student loan world. The federal government and
other lenders also often hire contractors known as “servicers”
to manage monthly billing of debtors, for example. Some of
those servicers are private companies, and some, such as
PHEEA, are
affiliated with state governments.
- Ask who suffers: The pain of student debt is not distributed equally among all socioeconomic classes, localities or races. Mitchell suggested journalists might find interesting local stories by checking out University of Utah economist Marshall Steinbaum’s heat maps showing student debt by ZIP code. Temple University’s Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice, led by Sara Goldrick-Rab, also has published reports on the disparate racial impacts of debt.