FAP911: Student credit cards, Congressional hearings, Jonathan Coulton
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Weekly Financial Aid Roundup
Goodbye, student credit cards.
A perspective on student loan programs.
Impending bank failures.
Scholarship Update
Google has a photo contest running. $7,500. Details at our free college scholarship search site.
Scholarship Points Instructions
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You know how special you guys are, listeners of the Financial Aid Podcast? The House Committee on Education and Labor knows you by name. I got an email from the Committee last night.
From George Miller and the House Committee on Education and Labor:
On Thursday, May 21, the House Education and Labor Committee will hold a hearing to examine proposals that will make historic increases in college aid by enacting reforms that will make the nation’s federal student loan programs more reliable, effective and efficient for students, families and taxpayers.
One of …

FAP907: Free scholarships book giveaway, Earth day free stuff
Click here to download the MP3 file
Weekly Financial Aid Roundup

The show turned 4 years old this week!
Sallie Mae’s student loan proposal – a review.

Scholarship Points Instructions
Are you a Scholarship Points member? In today’s show, get a Points code for 20 Scholarship Points by subscribing to the podcast and listening to the episode. Subscribing is fast, easy, and free.
If you have iTunes:
http://www.financialaidnews.com/itunes
If you have Google Reader:
http://www.financialaidnews.com/googlereader
If you subscribe by email:
http://www.financialaidnews.com/email
Remember, the points code is in the show itself, so you have to tune …

Daily Aid 104: Student loan default rate secret
Student Financial Aid News
From Inside Higher Ed:
As Congress prepares to take up their 2010 budget blueprints, supporters and critics of President Obama’s proposal to eliminate the Family Federal Education Loan program are ramping up their arguments for and against the plan. The Consumer Bankers Association has attracted more than 4,000 college financial aid administrators, parents and loan industry officials as signers of a petition asking lawmakers to sustain the competition between the lender-based guaranteed loan and the competing direct loan programs. The heads …

Daily Aid 103: Should students have credit cards?
Student Financial Aid News
From NASFAA:
“Student-loan companies, faced with the threat of extinction, are finding a glimmer of hope in the Senate’s budget blueprint for the 2010 fiscal year,” The Chronicle of Higher Education reports. “The spending plan, which will be unveiled later today or tomorrow, will not instruct the education committees in Congress to undertake the deficit-cutting process known as budget reconciliation. The omission could make it harder for Democrats to push through President Obama’s plan to abolish the guaranteed-loan program. That’s because …

Daily Aid 87: President Obama: finish high school, one more year of higher ed
Student Financial Aid News
Last night, President Obama remarked:
Right now, three-quarters of the fastest-growing occupations require more than a high school diploma, and yet just over half of our citizens have that level of education. We have one of the highest high school dropout rates of any industrialized nation, and half of the students who begin college never finish.
This is a prescription for economic decline, because we know the countries that out-teach us today will out-compete us tomorrow. …

Daily Aid 85: Taxing online degrees, financial aid scams
Student Financial Aid News
From NASFAA:
“People claiming to represent the U.S. Education Department are calling students to offer scholarships and grants,” the Star-Telegram reports. “The callers ask for a bank or credit-card number, saying the information will be used for a $249 processing fee. But it’s a fake. … ‘Do not give your financial information to individuals making these claims,’ the department warns. If you receive a call, report it to 1-800-MIS-USED, or send an e-mail to oig.hotline@ed.gov. The government Web site www.ftc.gov/scholarshipscams …

FAP899: Correction on FAFSA dependency overrides, jobs, free stuff
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Weekly Financial Aid Roundup
There’s an epilogue to last week’s CNBC story.
What to do if your student loan company goes out of business!
Mail Bag
Robin, a financial aid administrator, wrote in with this vitally important update about FAFSA dependency overrides:
For Dependency Overrides the Federal guidelines are extremely clear. Being self-supporting is NOT grounds for an override.
Instead you must prove INVOLUNTARY DISSOLUTION OF THE FAMILY. This means you were forced to leave your parents’ home and have no contact with them. You must …

Daily Aid 78: CNBC Followup, Stimulus
Student Financial Aid News
A followup from the CNBC story on Thursday night:
I thought of my brother, who’d been laid off in December, and his daughter who is a freshman at an expensive private college. He’d gone through all of the school’s procedures, filled out the “mid-year change in circumstances” forms, and had received a “Sorry, this year is all set” note back from the financial aid office. I wasn’t sure if this was the type of situation that Chris was looking for, but sent him …

Daily Aid 76: Financial aid at risk, stimulus, student loan blogs
Student Financial Aid News
From Inside Higher Ed:
When Middlebury College announced its plans to deal with a budget shortfall last week, however, it announced that financial aid was on the table; that a little more would be asked of students on financial aid and their parents; and that aid for international students would be scaled back a bit. Middlebury remains need-blind and pledged to meeting the full need of admitted applicants, but it may be unique among the competitive private colleges …