Department of Education must end the billion-dollar student loan collection boondoggle

In the last month, the contracting process for companies vying to be one of the U.S. Department of Education’s debt collectors has spiraled into chaos.

Companies that didn’t make the final cut or were fired for misleading student loan borrowers are suing the Department, and the judge overseeing the litigation has issued an order preventing the Department from assigning new accounts to debt collectors, leading to claims that collection on defaulted student loans has ground to a halt.

This chaos is not serving taxpayers or student loan borrowers. The Department of Education should end its sweetheart deal with collection agencies and find a better way to work with defaulted student loan borrowers.

{mosads}According to collection industry insiders, the Department of Education contract is “[t]he most sought-after contract within this industry” because of the ever-increasing volume of student loan debt that is extremely difficult to discharge in bankruptcy.

In 2014, the federal government paid over $1 billion to private collection agencies. But are student loan borrowers and taxpayers getting what they pay for?

New data from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) shows that they are not.

The Higher Education Act provides student loan borrowers in default with two ways to get their loans back into good standing: consolidation and rehabilitation. 

Just released CFPB data shows that the rehabilitation program, where borrowers make a series of payments in order to cure their defaulted loans, is not creating a sustainable path to student loan repayment. Over a third of borrowers who rehabilitate their loans will re-default within the first two years. 

This is likely because, after completing their nine monthly rehabilitation payments, a substantial number of borrowers never successfully transition into one of the affordable income-driven repayment (IDR) plans.

In contrast, the vast majority (95 percent) of the reported student loan borrowers who chose to consolidate to get out of default (taking out a new loan to pay off of the old one), are still in good standing a year out. When borrowers consolidate out of default, they are immediately placed into a repayment plan, usually an IDR plan.

Moreover, a Treasury Department pilot project found that when properly counseled, more borrowers choose consolidation over rehabilitation. Yet 70 percent of borrowers whose student loans are collected by private collection agencies choose rehabilitation. 

Why? One word: commissions.

The Department of Education typically pays collection agencies $1,710 if they can get a borrower to complete a rehabilitation plan but only $150 if they work with a borrower to consolidate the defaulted loans. 

What’s more, borrowers do not even need to work with a collection agency to consolidate their loans; they can go straight to studentloans.gov and do it.

Most of the work that is done by collection agencies can be automated or easily brought in-house. Just as borrowers can use studentloans.gov to consolidate their loans, that same tool could be used to establish rehabilitation plans.

The only functions that would be lost without collection agencies are calling and counseling borrowers. The value of making calls is questionable: Treasury found that of the 21,000 calls it initiated in its pilot project, less than 3 percent were ever even answered. 

And collection agencies are doing a terrible job at counseling borrowers, as is evidenced by the wide disparity between the program collectors push borrowers into (rehabilitation) and the success of that program. And, in some cases, such as when borrowers dispute the amount owed, debt collectors simply transfer those loans back to the Department of Education.

Additionally, collection agencies routinely violate consumer protection laws. Debt collection calls generate more complaints to the CFPB than any other type of financial product or service. Recently, the Federal Trade Commission fined one of the Department of Education’s debt collectors — GC Services — $700,000 for making harassing phone calls to student loan borrowers and threatening illegal actions.

The value added by the private collection agencies working for the Department of Education is highly questionable but unquestionably expensive. Student loan borrowers deserve to understand their options and be set up for success. Taxpayers deserve to get their money’s worth. 

The Department of Education should end this billion dollar boondoggle to enrich private collection agencies and instead set up a system where borrowers can get unbiased and accurate information to resolve their student loan defaults.

Persis Yu is the director of National Consumer Law Center’s Student Loan Borrower Assistance Project.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.