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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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 Posted: Tue Jan 08, 2008 8:07 pm |
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| internisus wrote: |
| I had a problem with my private debtor being totally unreasonable, asked to whom I should send a letter, and sent that letter twice with no reply. |
Mind if I ask who the lender was? I had a private lender that was a total bastard after graduating, and I've found the federal government MUCH more gracious regarding repayment.
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2008 10:41 am |
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| internisus wrote: |
| The private lendor was uh the State of New Jersey. In the form of a company or entity of some kind called the New Jersey Higher Education Student Assistance Authority. Let me tell you: their customer service blows. |
HUH.
I'd never heard of a state using a private corporation for its arm of operation. When I was going to school in SC, I got all my federal loans managed by the South Carolina Student Loans Corporation, which was kind of a private-sector front-end for federal government student loans. But they just mediated between the feds and the students.
I had (and still have) an outstanding GATE Loan, a private loan from a lender that works with colleges on a case-by-case basis. I was given that loan to supplement the tuition payments remaining after some scholarships and federal loans paid most of my way through a really good private college. Anyway, I withdrew from that school because I wanted a break from academics—working for about two years before finishing up at a public university—and they called me as expected about six months after I'd quit attending classes. I told their operator that I didn't have the money to make a payment (which was true since I was barely making ends meet on slightly-higher-than-minimum wage), and she said that there was no deferral plan.
This was, of course, a lie. I've since found that many collection agents (whether they work for the lender directly or work for a collection agency representing the lender) are commissioned, and many of them lie or misrepresent a debtor's payment options as a way to coerce a payment.
Because I had no money to pay, and because I wasn't made aware of my options for deferral, that loan naturally went into default.
Then came the coup de'grace.
The college I'd attended while under the GATE Loan had a you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours policy. If a former student hadn't entered into the repayment process, the college was contractually obligated to regard the default as a payment owed to the college. They then employ the same measures used when a former student owes the college money (like outstanding tuition or library fees): they hold a transcript.
I'd gotten accepted into the graduate program of my choice last summer, but it seemed that I was going to be unable to enroll because that former college wouldn't release a transcript... because the GATE Loan folks had asserted their contractual right to have my records frozen until I entered into a repayment arrangement. Of course, the desired "repayment arrangement" was wholly on their terms, none of which were plausible given my means. I was only able to get a transcript released because I gave proof to my old college's head of financial aid that the lender had misrepresented my payment options. When the lender breached its responsibilities to inform me of reasonable avenues for repayment, the college took that as grounds for them to breach their responsibility to protect the lender's interests, so they released the sole transcript I needed.
Which illustrates the main things that I want to call to attention:
Remember that anyone calling you for collection purposes might be getting paid by commission. You can serve your interests better by learning the name of their supervisors, calling their supervisors at a later date, and verifying that the repayment options they'd listed comprise the whole gamut of your options.
Also remember that they will usually not offer to cut you a break. If they say anything like, "I can get you a deal on this and knock the collateral down to (x) if you can pay three installments of (y) over the next six months," it's probably something they were going to need to offer you anyway, but it appeals to your emotions by letting you think that someone on the inside's watching out for you. Nine times out of ten, they're not. They're just laying verbal icing on that slice of the shitpie.
How do I manage these problems?
I go to graduate school and craft elaborate plans for my future financial state. This gets the federal loans off my back legally, and it justifies my continued avoidance of the private lenders who have proven consistently inflexible and unrealistic. It's okay for me since I don't need a clean credit record for most of the things I'm doing, but I understand if that's a bigger problem for others.
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2008 3:32 pm |
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| SplashBeats wrote: |
| you still chose to attend a pricey private university, and your debt would've been fairly manageable if you'd gone to a public school and kept your loans to state-owned lenders. |
Depending on how you handle your education, a private college can be worth the debt. Mine was.
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2008 10:01 pm |
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| Broco wrote: |
Could you explain how?
The only private schools that it seems reasonable to me to pay an arm and a leg for are the well-known elite universities that can fast-track you to a high-level career. |
I can explain how it was worth it to me, but I ought to clarify that I haven't attended college for career advancement. Part of my reasons for attending college were the same as internisus': familial and communal expectations. But, really, I'd come from an absolutely terrible high school experience that hadn't encouraged my curiosity or creativity (outside of a few biology classes when I got to feed the snakes all the time), and more than anything I'd wanted a community where I could give full vent to my curiosity and intuition.
The small, private school that I attended was Presbyterian College in Clinton, SC. The school was based on Christian religious values, yeah, but it wasn't some kind of conservative breeding ground. The academic faculty whom I got to know especially well—they being the English and Religion & Philosophy Departments—were able to remain aloof from the kinds of academic trends that foster competition in most public universities (such as the need to publish meaningless papers three times a year), and they were instead devoted to the quality of their teaching. And for them, "the quality of their teaching" was virtually inseparable from "the quality of their students."
The English department faculty helped my sense of analysis by teaching me how to ask better questions of myself and whatever I was analyzing. The Religion & Philosophy department faculty helped to develop my sense of how private experience and communal identity relate, as well as the complex relationship between spiritual faith (of whatever creed) and rationality. These departments could devote themselves to their students because the college's basic values were not the values of a public University. In other words, the Presbyterian emphasis upon the relationship between individuals and their community made a lot of the junk you see in public universities unnecessary, such as department in-fighting, jealousy over student accomplishments, and a lack of concern for each student's overall well-being.
I'd started my undergrad work there, as I said, and left before getting the degree. (Presbyterian College is also really good about putting its graduates in the jobs they want, but, again, that's not why I was there.) I finished up at a public university, so I've experienced the other end of the public-private split, too. My alma mater, the public university, had an excellent English department, but its faculty members necessarily had a very different approach to their teaching and students. By way of comparison, I'd mentioned the difference to one of the English faculty who'd been there for years—ever since the mid-70s—and he told me that he envied the freedom of professors at certain private schools because they were able to enter more intimately into the mentor-pupil ideal of higher education in the liberal arts.
So the benefit doesn't lie necessarily in the degree's marketability. If you've got a college where the faculty maintain the older ideals of liberal arts education, and if you want to take advantage of that, then I think you'll find smaller, private schools well-suited. I mean, I know this is going to sound straight off a college or university's PR material, but you stand a better chance of getting more than just a degree if the private college is oriented in such a way that allows its faculty to focus upon their students rather than their careers.
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Thu Jan 10, 2008 1:53 am |
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| Broco wrote: |
| Adilegian: yes, there's a lot to be said for a university that avoids the usual situation of the profs feeling their job is research and undergraduate courses are an irritating chore, like washing the dishes. Are there really no public universities that take this tack though? |
I wouldn't say that no public universities take this tack, but my experience suggests that your best bet in a public university is to find maybe one or two teachers who care about their teaching as much as (or more than) whatever research ambitions they have.
I guess I mean that I expect it's more incidental in public universities, whereas certain private universities make that level of accessibility and involvement a core part of their institution's identity.
The faculty in the creative writing program I'm in now have things set up so they can take a similar approach to their teaching as the one I described at Presbyterian College. They want to create a personable, idiosyncratic environment wherein good writers can improve themselves through the faculty and through each other, and they do that by creating a sense of community through the faculty's own passion for literary art. (They even wrote among their list of "rules" for the program "this might sound a little weird, but remember that we love you. Otherwise we wouldn't have asked you to come here.")
There are some correlations. They're not competing with their students, and they're not egged on to publishpublishPUBLISH whiirrrrclicksnap PUBLISH. But they're also adults working with adults, and that creates a kind of natural (and, at this point, expected) distance that I didn't see at PC.
Anyway, I think I'd be wrong to say that private, expensive colleges always render such-and-such an experience. I just mean that I went to one, am in debt for it, and still think that the debt is worth the experience. Having been involved with a few other English departments since then, I think that PC became worth it because of the faculty's freedom from a lot of the burdens that characterize the dregs of being a professional academic.
Ultimately, the value of your education is what you do with yourself when you're enrolled, as well as how you continue to cultivate yourself after you've graduated. In my experience, I've been served better by BA from a relatively minor public University plus continual work to improve my ability to write than I would have if I'd gotten a BA from an ivy league school and had rested on the degree's authority afterward.
And I'm sure the educational priorities change when you're going into a field like software programming, engineering, or one of the sciences. From a liberal arts POV, though, I think private schools have a lot of good things going for them.
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Thu Jan 10, 2008 11:41 pm |
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Just a quick note here while I'm catching up on the thread. CubaLibre, you might enjoy some of Wendell Berry's essays, particularly Sex, Economy, Community, and Freedom.
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 4:12 am |
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My WPM: 354
Comprehension rate: 64%
The test was interesting, and I wonder how the fact that the text self-consciously treated speed-reading affects performance.
It's not universally reliable, I think, because it gauges speed reading in terms of a particular kind of knowledge that doesn't exactly flatter my talents. Had it been about abstractions, and had it featured an argument of some sort, then I expect my performance would have improved.
In fact, I got the comprehension questions that focused upon numbers wrong, whereas I got the later questions (which focused upon the article's argument for which speed-reading program works best) right. So! I expect I do much better with abstractions -- that is, writing that less emphasizes discrete quantification and statistics.
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