Private Student Loans: More Important than Child Support and Taxes?
Robert Shireman, the founder and president of The Institute, is guest-blogging this week on Higher Ed Watch, a higher education news and policy initiative from the New America Foundation. Here's an excerpt from his first post:
For most unsecured loans, the debtor who runs into difficulty can file for Chapter 7 liquidation or Chapter 13 reorganization, so a judge can sort out the appropriate treatment of the various loans. But there is a short list of debts that the law subjects to a different standard, allowing for discharge in only the most extreme circumstances. Generally the items on this special list make intuitive sense; for example, it seems appropriate for it to be especially difficult for people to escape child support responsibilities, overdue taxes, and criminal fines.
Federal student loans don’t quite seem like they deserve to be on that same list, and until 1998 they were not. Instead, there was an intermediate approach: they had special treatment, but only for the first seven years in repayment. After that, they were treated like other debts. There is at least some justification for making federal loans hard to discharge: they are backed by taxpayer dollars, and they come with some borrower protections in cases of economic hardship, unemployment, death, and disability.
But private student loans? There is no good reason that they should be accorded any heightened status, much less the exalted category that competes with criminal fines, child support, taxes, and now federal student loans. How and why did they gain this status in the 2005 bankruptcy bill?