Report: Student loan companies may not be giving borrowers best advice

You take out tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes hundreds of thousands, just to get a college degree. Once you walk across the stage, you’re expected to start paying up. 

“Something needs to be done, something needs to help us borrowers,” said Mary Boyke, a mother who took a loan out so her son could get a degree in 2006 and has been struggling ever since.

“They give you all these things which you believe you’re doing, you know is it a forebearance, is it an income-based, whatever, whatever, and it winds up being wrong and you pay because of interest on interested and you get nowhere,” she added.

A report by the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education found that Federal Student Aid does not effectively monitor loan companies and that there’s no defined standard for non-compliance.

New York State Senator Kevin Thomas has pushed for a bill in the budget package that passed earlier this week that would require all entities that service federal loans to be licensed by the Department of Financial Services, and be regulated.

For more information on that bill, click here.