According to a White House fact sheet, a teacher $25,000 in debt and earning $30,000 a year will see their payments reduced to about $114 a month.

Cohen is one of a handful of Congress members who are attempting to create a path for students with private student loan debt to declare bankruptcy

“It’s really important to realize that the faces of student loan borrowers are not just young people who went to traditional colleges,” Loonin said. “The faces of student loan borrowers are also older people, non-traditional students, working adults. It’s a much broader community.”

One particular concern is the rise of publicly traded for-profit colleges — programs like the University of Phoenix, which often serve non-traditional students and confer degrees online — which has produced a high rate of default among its students.

Loonin said that about 70 percent of the people she works with at the NCLC, most of who are already in default, attended for-profit colleges.

“There’s rampant fraud in that sector, and deception,” she said. “A lot of people are being deceived into signing up, ent, faculties, and deceived about the prospects at the back end. The for-profit issue is really a consumer fraud issue.”

In a Wednesday statement, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., praised Mr. Obama for his proposal but pointed to students at for-profit institutions as being in need of further government assistance. Continua a leggere →

College tuition was less than what today’s students pay for textbooks when Caron and Jack Knopoff attended Chicago’s Wright Junior College in the mid-1960s.

Tuition at what is now Wilbur Wright College was $24 per credit hour, Caron Knopoff says. To cover this cost, the couple, who were dating at the time, lived with their own parents and worked – Caron at an insurance agency and Jack at an accounting firm.

Caron later transferred to Northeastern Illinois University to complete her bachelor’s degree in primary education. There, she says tuition was around $200 a year. Jack completed a degree in accounting at Roosevelt University, paying $40 per credit hour.

“I thought it was so much compared to what we had paid before and we were so worried about it,” Caron says.

Graduating from college debt-free is uncommon today: Two-thirds of the class of 2017 graduated with student loans averaging $28,650, according to The Institute for College Access and Success.

Before the 1960s, student loans didn’t exist. Federal loans for students with financial need started with the Higher Education Act of 1965, then opened to all students in 1978.

The average cost of tuition, fees, room and board for 1963-64 was $1,248, or $10,040 in 2017-18 dollars. By contrast, the average cost in 2017-18 was $23,835, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

“The cost of college then was significantly easier to pay for,” says Victoria Yuen, a policy analyst for postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress, an independent policy research organization. Continua a leggere →