President Obama took an important step this week when he signed an executive order providing relief to millions of struggling student loan borrowers and urged Congress to pass a student loan refinancing bill that is scheduled for a vote in the Senate today, according to an editorial today in the New York Times. Both the executive order and the refinancing bill speak to a grave problem that has trapped recent college graduates and threatens the long-term health of the economy. This problem has its roots in the financial crisis, which the editorial claimed to have destroyed trillions of dollars in household savings and home equity that families might otherwise have used to pay for college. (Even before the recession, the state colleges, which educate about 70 percent of the nation’s students, reacted to state budget cuts by raising tuition.) With no other choice, students and their families financed college by relying more heavily on student loans. According to the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, student debt has doubled since 2007 and now stands at about $1.2 trillion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/opinion/student-borrowers-and-the-eco…
The student loan debt crisis was the subject of ABI's Student Debt Symposium, held on May 30 at Georgetown University Law Center. If you were unable to attend, you can purchase all sessions from the program on ABI's eLearning site! This unique day-long symposium, funded in part by a grant from the National Conference of Bankruptcy Judges Endowment for Education, featured academics, consumer bankruptcy practitioners, bankruptcy judges, consumers and policy-makers addressing the causes, consequences and possible reform of the student debt problem. Click here to purchase: http://cle.abi.org/taxonomy/term/2045,1496