Hey Everyone!
We had a big week. Here is the Town Hall Meeting we did earlier today with Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone), and others in case you missed it. Also, we were featured yesterday in this article at Newsweek. Lots of great comments on this important article. Please leave your own!
I'm glad to report also that the petition grew by about 100,000 signatures in the past 7 days. Thanks to everyone who helped make that happen. We are the pioneers of this struggle!
This did not happen in a vaccuum. The future is not set, and while we are thrilled that our concept for cancelling loans by executive order is now leading the national conversation on student loans, the defenders of the lending system are responding...the knives are coming out!
We got this. We can get these loans totally cancelled, but we have to fight harder than ever going forward for that to happen. Getting to a million signatures on the petition will be a great step towards that end. Please...do whatever you can do to spread the word about it. We could and should get up to 10 million or more signatures, if not more. It truly does start with your efforts.
Here is Bruce and Dorothy, one of the many families we are fighting for:
I took my first student loans in 1989, met my wife in college and our daughter was born before we graduated. I was in a BFA/MFA program and my wife was completing her masters and entered a PhD/ Ed Psych program. I am Native American and my wife did her dissertation research on the reservations.
When my wife began writing her dissertation her advisor (who was the head of the Ed Psych department) wanted her to change her hypothesis to agree with the research data. Her ethics would not let her do it. So this professor would take her drafts and hold them until 2 weeks before the end of the semester and would not advise her on his requirements for drafts. As part of the PhD program, she was required to be enrolled during the rewrites until her dissertation was finished. So she subsequently had to enroll for 3 extra semesters because of the professor's stone walling. She had to go to her outside chair for advice on draft rewrites and ended up doing an end run around her professor and had signatures on her final paper from her entire committee before resubmitting to her advisor. In retaliation her advisor, after signing off on the dissertation, refused to give her a recommendation. This is the kiss of death in academia and no one would even interview her. She carried a 4.0 gpa through her masters and doctoral programs. I would never complete my BFA.
Our daughter was born in '92 and diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis. I had to abandon my studies and go back to driving a truck to support my family. Because of the enormous pressure of medical bills and expenses we both had to go on the IBR loan repayment program. We had to declare bankruptcy in '98 and were not allowed to discharge the student loans. Several times we were forced to go into forbearance because of the financial pressures we were under.
In 2011 I was forced out of the trucking industry because of health issues and went to a community college to retrain for the job market. We continued to pay our student loans. I earned dual AAS degrees in wind and solar energy and finally got hired in 2015. In 2018 my wife was declared fully disabled and her loans have been discharged. I have paid back +160% of my original loans and still owe almost 200% of my original loan amounts.
The predatory nature of the student loan servicers has me making monthly payments that, on average, 85% goes to interest (that is compounded daily), fees, etc. The student loans are being parsed out like the subprime loans were in recent real estate/ banking disaster. Navient is making their money. I am barely scratching the principal.
Both my wife and I are in our early 60's and I see no way out of this debt until I take the big dirt nap.
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Please help us fight. When you do, we will become an unstoppable force!