Happy Graduation! Sherrod Brown Wants to Consolidate your Student Loans
Columbus Dispatch – It’s college commencement season, and in lieu of graduation cards, Sen. Sherrod Brown is introducing a bill that he hopes will spare students more paper in the mail.
His bill, being introduced Wednesday, aims to allow students with both Family Federal Education Loan debt and direct loan debt to convert their debt into direct loans between Jan. 1, 2012 and Oct. 1, 2012.
Last year, Congress overhauled the federal financial aid system, ending subsidies to private lenders through the FFEL program and replacing those loans with direct loans to students. But while students who borrowed starting July 1, 2010 or later will have to make one federal payment each month upon graduation, more than six million borrowers currently are borrowing under both systems, meaning they will need to make at least two payments to at least two servicers upon graduation.
Such a situation can often be daunting to graduates who are looking for a job and dealing with post-college bureaucracy, and could ultimately lead to increased defaults, according to Nancy Hoover, director of financial aid at Denison University and chair of the National Direct Student Loan Coalition.
