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The federal government has, in recent years, paid debt collectors close to $1 billion annually to help distressed borrowers climb out of default and scrounge up regular monthly payments. New government figures suggest much of that money may have been wasted.
Nearly half of defaulted student-loan borrowers who worked with debt collectors to return to good standing on their loans defaulted again within three years, according to an analysis by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. For their work, debt collectors receive up to $1,710 in payment from the U.S. Department of Education each time a borrower makes good on soured debt through a process known as rehabilitation. They keep those funds even if borrowers subsequently default again, contracts show. The department has earmarked more than $4.2 billion for payments to its debt collectors since the start of the 2013 fiscal year, federal spending data show.
[...] Officials at the CFPB say the government should reexamine whether the loan program, and the lucrative contracts it bestows on private firms, is working for the millions of Americans struggling to repay their taxpayer-backed student debt.
"When student loan companies know that nearly half of their highest-risk customers will quickly fail, it's time to fix the broken system that makes this possible," said Seth Frotman, the consumer bureau's top student-loan official.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:54PM (1 child)
I currently teach at Cambridge and I've previously taught at a second-tier university and I've given invited talks at MIT, Harvard, Berkeley and a few other places in the US. First, the idea that you can judge the intelligence of the students from watching a video of a lecture is complete nonsense.
Second, the difference between the two that I've noticed is not so much the average or highest intelligence but the lowest intelligence. The brightest students here are not always better than the brightest I've seen elsewhere, but the weakest students that I teach now would be in the top 10-20% in most other places. That has a huge impact on what and how I can teach: I can set challenging exercises and expect that everyone will be able to do them, whereas previously I had to cope with a wide range of abilities and ensure that I had both simple tasks that the weaker students could achieve and extension exercises for everyone else. Quite often, people at second-tier institutions won't bother with the extension exercises and this can leave the better students feeling bored with the course.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:28PM
I think we basically agree although you may have expressed about the same idea more accurately and concisely.
Not having been to MIT, but having suffered thru SAT-prep type stuff, and having heard a lot about Strang because I learned linear algebra from his textbook years ago, I had two proven false expectations:
1) Given the language prep section of SAT/ACT test prep I assumed Strang (and other lecturers) would have obscure vocabulary in their lectures to match the knowledge required to get a great standardized test score. Which in retrospect is like expecting a football player who is capable of doing many pushups to be doing nothing but endless repetitions of pushups every time you see him. I've sat thru state-U and private college tier of lectures and watched ivy league lectures online and their probably higher verbal IQ scores are not reflected in the language of the lectures. You need a high verbal SAT score to get into MIT, not to understand the professors lectures.
2) Having suffered thru the textbooks, before watching the authors of my favorite textbooks I expected (or hoped?) they'd go into greater detail or speed thru simpler sections. However the dude who wrote the book tends to put-put along about as fast as my state-U or private college instructor did the same topic. Maybe a little impostor syndrome, these students are supposed to be super smart so if my instructor had to burn an entire lecture on the four subspaces of a matrix then surely the great Strang himself and the smartest math kids in the country will blow thru the topic in two minutes, naah, he burns a whole lecture hour on it too.
There's a strong cultural indoctrination as seen in Star Trek or whatever fictional dramatic stuff that the top students learn faster or deeper, but they mostly just seem to have wealthier or better connected parents, which is kinda a bummer.
The lack of dumb kids has to do with selectivity in admissions nothing more. To be a regular 18 year old freshman at the state U or private college they act like they're doing a huge favor to allow you to go into debt but the hoops to jump thru were surprisingly low. And if you abandon that as I did and go night school and weekend school the only admissions requirement for non-ivies that I've experienced is the check must not bounce. So naturally the dumbest kids will be stuck in the classes I was sitting thru. It wasn't really a problem. In K12 public schools the dumbest kids were major discipline problems but the discipline problems don't enter higher ed in general, so the kid next to me flunking his diff eqs midterm didn't really matter. Oh one thing where it mattered is the much hated group projects but generally that means one person does all the work and everyone gets credit, which is pretty much like the business world.