FAP527: How to fix your credit report, direct to consumer marketing, monthly scholarship, NJHESAA, David McMillin
FAP527: How to fix your credit report, direct to consumer marketing, monthly scholarship, NJHESAA, David McMillin
Student Financial Aid News
+ The direct to consumer storm has begun – some less reputable student loan companies have allegedly begun sending out very aggressive marketing packages to students since they can no longer market to financial aid offices
+ It is illegal for a federal student loan company to offer you a gift of value in exchange for a loan application – called quid pro quo, or this for that
+ It is not currently illegal for a private student loan company to offer you gifts in exchange for a loan application, but it is kind of sleazy
+ Terminology: federal student loans can be direct or FFELP, though the media calls the latter private. Companies offering federal student loans can be private, like the Student Loan Network or Sallie Mae, but the federal loans are still government student loans. Private student loans are a different type of loan, not guaranteed by the government. I sense a blog post about this later today.
+ Disclosure: the Student Loan Network does not offer gifts of value beyond the free Financial Aid Newsletter, Financial Aid Podcast, blogs, and other informational resources like our scholarship search secrets eBook, and all free materials are made freely available whether or not you choose to use our services
+ Students already receiving lots of student loan consolidation marketing schemes with letterhead and ads that look like bills – don’t be fooled. Know who your lenders are – learn more about NSLDS and credit reports, and how to see your loan info
+ Check out your credit report – see who’s been buying your personal information
+ Want to reduce junk mail? Check out the FTC’s page on opting out of prescreened lists offered by credit bureaus
+ From Inside Higher Ed: Until now, the evolving controversy surrounding the federal student loan programs has focused mostly on the relationships between lenders and colleges and between lenders and federal officials. But now state guarantee agencies are being drawn into the fray, with Friday’s announcements that Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and New Jersey’s attorney general were investigating arrangements in which two lenders paid that state’s student loan guarantor millions of dollars for loans that the agency helped direct the lenders’ way.
+ Kennedy’s office released documents Friday showing that the New Jersey Higher Education Student Assistance Authority, one of 23 state-based agencies that guarantee loans provided by private lenders in the Family Federal Education Loan Program and provide a range of other services to colleges and students, had arrangements with Sallie Mae and the National Education Loan Network in which it received a cut (1.4 percent and 1 percent, respectively) of the volume of each loan referred to the lenders by the state agency.
+ The agreements, which the state agency ended on April 20 as scrutiny of the arrangements grew, has since 2000 brought the state agency $2.2 million a year from Sallie Mae and a lesser amount from Nelnet, according to The Star-Ledger of Newark, which first reported on the arrangements last week.
+ Oh yeah, PodCamp got a nice mention in Businessweek
Scholarship Update
+ College Prowler monthly scholarship submitted by Heather
+ Submit Your College Application Essay and Win $1,000 and 10 College Prowler guidebooks! A New Winner Chosen Every Month! College Prowler and Wachovia are prowling around for the best college application essays in the nation. Have you written an essay for any of your college applications? If so, submit it to the College Prowler – Wachovia Monthly Scholarship and you could win $1,000 along with 10 free College Prowler guidebooks to ensure you’re choosing the college that’s right for you.
+ Don’t have a college application essay? Submit an essay you wrote for one of your classes- just make sure it’s 1000 words or less.
+ Qualifications:
+ Applicant must be a current high school or college student.
+ Applicant must submit a college essay that is their original work.
+ Deadline: To qualify for each month’s contest, submit your essay by the last day of the month at 11:00 pm. (For example, the May 2007 contest deadline is May 31 at 11pm)
+ Details at our free college scholarship search site
News You Can Use
+ How to patch up your credit report
+ Vital to get your credit in great shape prior to applying for a PLUS loan or a private student loan
+ First, get a copy – check out our tutorial and screenshots at StudentLoanConsolidator.com
+ Review your credit report for inaccuracies
+ Make a spreadsheet and a folder
+ Make a list of inaccuracies or errors
+ Prepare a letter for each of the three credit bureaus documenting what’s wrong
+ Prepare a letter for each of the entities involved
+ Send it via a documentable delivery service – certified mail, UPS, Fedex, etc.
+ Credit bureaus have 30 days to make corrections or delete information
+ They are then required to send you a report of the results and a free, updated copy of your credit report, as well as notify anyone who made a hard inquiry in the last 6 months
+ Check out the tutorial on StudentPlatinum.com for more
Promo
+ Tomorrow night, New England Podcasting meetup at 7 PM at the Paradise Lounge in Boston
+ Come and hang out – there is an $8 cover charge, but we might be able to do something about that
Podsafe Music
+ David McMillin, Goodbye Southern Skies
+ Music via the Podsafe Music Network
Reminders
+ Private student loans
+ Stafford loans | Other federal student loans
+ Student loan consolidation at StudentLoanConsolidator.com
+ FAFSA tutorials and free help
+ Financial Aid Podcast Show Notes at FinancialAidNews.com.
+ The Financial Aid Podcast is a publication of the Student Loan Network.
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Do Not Mail Opt-Out Law would be fair to everyone.
The proposed recent “Do not mail” is an Opt-Out law. Only those not desiring advertising mail need opt-out. Anyone desiring advertising mail can do nothing – and continue to receive it. Why deny those wishing to avoid advertising mail the power to do so?
I do not consider handling unwanted advertising placed against my will on my personal property to be a civic obligation!
The US Supreme Court said in the Rowan case in 1970, â??â??In today’s [1970] complex society we are inescapably captive audiences for many purposes, but a sufficient measure of individual autonomy must survive to permit every householder to exercise control over unwanted mail. To make the householder the exclusive and final judge of what will cross his threshold undoubtedly has the effect of impeding the flow of ideas, information, and arguments that, ideally, he should receive and consider. Today’s merchandising methods, the plethora of mass mailings subsidized by low postal rates, and the growth of the sale of large mailing lists as an industry in itself have changed the mailman from a carrier of primarily private communications, as he was in a more leisurely day, and have made him an adjunct of the mass mailer who sends unsolicited and often unwanted mail into every home. It places no strain on the doctrine of judicial notice to observe that whether measured by pieces or pounds, Everyman’s mail today is made up overwhelmingly of material he did not seek from persons he does not know. And all too often it is matter he finds offensive.â??
Furthermore, the Supreme Court said, â??the mailer’s right to communicate is circumscribed only by an affirmative act of the addressee giving notice that he wishes no further mailings from that mailer.
To hold less would tend to license a form of trespass and would make hardly more sense than to say that a radio or television viewer may not twist the dial to cut off an offensive or boring communication and thus bar its entering his home. Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit; we see no basis for according the printed word or pictures a different or more preferred status because they are sent by mail.â??
We need a nationwide â??Do Not Mailâ?? law to create a one-stop, convenient place for homeowners to give senders the aforementioned affirmative notice that we do not want certain kinds of mail sent to our homes.
http://www.newdream.org/emails/ta19.html
Signed,
Ramsey A Fahel
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