Student Loan Debt Statistics
Due to mounting tuition costs, more and more individuals are turning to student loans, ultimately resulting in piled up debts! This has long been a topic of conversation, yet the problem persists or grows worse.
- Missouri fares better than most, ranking #32 for average student debt in the United States.
- A considerable 58 percent of students in Missouri graduated from school in 2017 owing money which they are still paying to this day.
- On a national scale, about 15 percent of the Class of 2017’s debt was for non-federal loans
Non-federal loans are more expensive, have fewer repayment options, and fewer consumer protections than their federal student loan counterparts. This has lead to rising levels of defaults which, in turn, offers a lucrative business opportunity for companies to cash in on lawsuit settlements, wage garnishments, and other compelled payments at the expense of unsuspecting young adults.
Who is the National Collegiate Student Loan Trusts?
One company that is taking advantage of the student loan situation is the National Collegiate Student Loan Trusts (NCSLT). The NCSLT is a large entity that is not officially a lender, but they purchase private student loans from lenders such as Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Discover, Charter One Banks, Bank One, Union Federal Savings, and others.
In recent years, the NCSLT and one of the debt collection companies that represent them, Transworld Systems, have been in some hot water over lawsuits filed under unscrupulous conditions.
As Transworld Systems churned out lawsuit after lawsuit, the mass-produced documentation they produced was based on questionable verification. For instance, the software they used would automatically fill in details like the amount owed and more. Once finished, they were signed by uninformed employees “for fear of losing their jobs,” according to reports. Additionally, Transworld employees would inaccurately swear that borrowers’ loans had been purchased by investors on dates that were sometimes months or even years before the loans were ever made!
In 2017, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau accused NCSLT and Transworld of using sloppy and illegal debt collection methods and asked a judge to order an independent audit of all 800,000 loans currently held.
Under the settlement terms, NCSLT (and their representative companies like Transworld) are forbidden from bringing any new cases or collecting on the judgments of old cases they won—at least until they had completed an audit of the paperwork underpinning every single one of the 800,000 loans. However, there is a dispute over this settlement that could take months, if not years, to resolve. This means that the NCSLT is able to continue bringing new lawsuits against borrowers.
