Making Student Debt Decisions Personal
I want to welcome Christian Sherrill to the NGPF team. He will be laser-focused on increasing access to financial education in classrooms across the United States. This is a story he wanted to share about why he is so passionate about financial education.
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As the new NGPF documentary suggests, millennial college-educated professionals aren’t alone in having made costly investments in student loans. Lifelong educators with multiple degrees have ‘em...
Chart: How Well Do Students Estimate The Monthly Payment On Their Student Loans?
Answer: No real surprise here. They are abysmal at it.
Here’s an explanation of this scatter plot (see below) from the recent Sallie Mae report on How America Pays for College:
Separately, students seem not to be fully cognizant of how much they will repay. Students were asked to estimate their future monthly student loan payments based on the amount of loans they currently have. Similarly to 2008, a scatterplot of responses indicates little correlation between the amounts students...
NGPF Podcast: Tim Talks To Social Entrepreneur Ted Gonder, Co-Founder of Moneythink
By Tim Ranzetta
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Jul 24, 2017
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Podcasts, Paying for College, Student Loans, Current Events, Entrepreneurship
I had a great time talking with social entrepreneur, Ted Gonder, who co-founded Moneythink. Moneythink is a non-profit organization helping firstgen high school students navigate “to and through” college. Ted shares what he has learned since starting Moneythink out of his college dorm room at the University of Chicago and his personal odyssey to pursue the “road less traveled.” He discusses the thinking behind the new service delivery model for Moneythink and why the...
Question: How Does America Pay for College?
By Tim Ranzetta
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Jul 20, 2017
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Current Events, Question of the Day, Research, Student Loans, Teaching Strategies, Chart of the Week
Good bell ringer to get the conversation started about paying for college. Can start the class by asking your students how they think families will pay for college:
What are the sources that families tap into?
What are 3 most important categories?
Once they have given their answers, you can move on to the chart below.
Sallie Mae out with their tenth annual study showing how families are covering the cost of college. Lots of interesting graphs, charts, infographics that I will be sharing over...
NGPF FAVORITES: Our Best OFF TO COLLEGE Resources
By Tim Ranzetta
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Jul 07, 2017
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Activities, Credit Scores, Activity, Behavioral Finance, Career, Paying for College, Budgeting, Savings, Student Loans, Stocks, Current Events, Interactive
This month’s NGPF Favorites List comes from Sid Sharma – one of NGPF’s veteran “Power Interns” who has been with us for 3 years. Sadly, we will wish him well as he heads off to college this fall! We wanted Sid to reflect on his NGPF experience (he has literally “touched” every element in the NGPF curriculum) and highlight the resources that have enabled him to become the knowledgeable, action-oriented, process-innovator that he is today!...
What A Student Loan Survey Tells Us That We Need To Be Teaching In HS Classrooms
Interesting survey from Student Loan report demonstrates the biggest knowledge gaps that college seniors have about their student loans. Let’s be sure students leave our high school classrooms knowing these key concepts BEFORE they take out student loans (my comments in sub-bullets):
65% of respondents didn’t know that the standard repayment term on their student loans
Why this is important: May choose longer repayment terms if they focus only on monthly payment
46% of...
What's The Catch?: Student Loan Forgiveness Or...
By Tim Ranzetta
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May 31, 2017
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Activities, Activity, Paying for College, Student Loans, Advertising, Current Events, Case Study
What if you were a student loan borrower struggling to make your monthly payment and saw this ad pop up on your computer screen one day:
Or maybe this one:
When you called the customer service phone number, you hear assurances like…
“Let me enroll you in a student loan forgiveness program and we will get your monthly payment reduced and even get your loan forgiven.”
“We will get you pre-approved for Federal government programs that will forgive or eliminate your...
Student Loans: You Better Know What You're Signing Up For!
By Tim Ranzetta
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May 24, 2017
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Activities, Activity, Paying for College, WebQuest, Student Loans, Current Events
As your seniors head off to college in the fall, you better arm them with the information they need to succeed financially during and after college. The biggest issue they will deal with in college: Student Loans. They will be required to go through an online “counseling” process which I would describe as “too little, too late” just before their loan is disbursed. I was trying to come up with a fun way (Ok, I might be stretching it here) to get them to review what in...
Question: What Are The New Interest Rates on Federal Student Loans?
By Tim Ranzetta
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May 12, 2017
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Question of the Day, Paying for College, Research, Student Loans, Current Events
Answer: 4.45% for federal direct student loans effective July 1, 2017 (up from 3.76% for 2016-17 school year).
Why the increase? Student loan interest rates are now tied to the 10 Year Treasury Bond interest rate.
From Bloomberg:
New undergraduate loans from the Department of Education are due to carry an interest rate of 4.45 percent, up from 3.76 percent for the academic year ending in June. Rates on some graduate loans are set to rise from 5.31 percent to 6 percent, while rates on loans to...
Article: This Is One Case Where A PLUS Is Not So Positive
WSJ article out today warning of the dangers of Parent PLUS loans. I thought this was particularly pertinent as high school seniors pore over their financial aid award letters before making a May 1st decision. Here’s the lede:
Millions of U.S. parents have taken out loans from the government to help their children pay for college. Now a crushing bill is coming due. Hundreds of thousands have tumbled into delinquency and default. In the process, many have delayed retirement, put off health...
What Do High School Seniors Think About the Financial Aid Process?
By Tim Ranzetta
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Apr 13, 2017
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Behavioral Finance, Paying for College, Student Loans, Current Events, Chart of the Week
It’s April so I thought I would do a temperature check for my AVID class just before we dove into an activity analyzing aid award packages. Here’s the word cloud that came from their individual responses (with some mentor comments sprinkled in which tended to be more on the positive side):
Why did I do this?
I think this is the “elephant in the room” for many first gen students and by identifying it, I thought I had an opportunity to address it. We know the importance...
From March Madness to April Anguish...
Yes, it’s that time of the year..thin envelopes, thick envelopes, cost of attendance, financial aid, subsidized loans, unsubsidized loans and the dreaded PLUS loan plug (for the uninitiated, the Parent PLUS loan is often the way that financial aid offices get their offers to balance out). Here are three activities from our Paying for College unit that I used recently with AVID students at Mountain View High School to lessen the anguish of this process and prepare them to analyze their own...
What I Have Been Reading This Week...
By Tim Ranzetta
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Mar 31, 2017
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Article, Credit Scores, Career, Paying for College, Question of the Day, Research, Credit Cards, Investing, Student Loans, Current Events, Credit Reports
Here’s a weekly round-up of articles that caught my attention this week that I thought you would find interesting:
Want to find out what it feels like to own a volatile stock? Find out how this investor got emotional by making a $3 trade in this MarketWatch article, “I drove myself crazy by investing $3 in the stock market.”
“Turns out, it doesn’t cost much to drive yourself batty over your investments. For the past week, ever since I broke one of my cardinal...
Resource Lists for Financial Educators (courtesy of Barbara O'Neill of Rutgers Cooperative Extension)
By Tim Ranzetta
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Mar 28, 2017
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Activities, Credit Scores, Career, Paying for College, Research, Budgeting, Credit Cards, Identity Theft, Personal Finance, Investing, Mutual Funds, Savings, WebQuest, Financial Literacy, Student Loans, Checking Accounts, Debit Cards, Payment Types, Stocks, Current Events, Insurance, Video Resource, Case Study, Credit Reports, Employment, Quizzes, Entrepreneurship
What does a distinguished professor do during her sabbatical? Curate personal finance resources, of course! In this blog post, Barbara O’Neill shares the fruits of her hundreds of hours of labor in putting together three awesome resource lists (see bottom of post for links to her lists), including what what she considered the “best of the best” from the NGPF library. As she describes below, the purpose of her odyssey was to replenish her “well” of creative...
Question: How Many Borrowers Can't Repay Their Student Loans?
By Tim Ranzetta
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Mar 15, 2017
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Student Loans, Paying for College, Question of the Day, Research, Current Events, Article
Answer (from Consumer Federation analysis reported by CNBC): In 2016, more than 4.2 million out of 42.4 million borrowers were in default. This is a 1.1 million student increase from 2015. Default is a condition where the borrower has not made a payment on their loan for 9 months.
What makes this more troubling is that these increases in defaults are occurring at a time when the economic statistics, especially unemployment rates are at historical lows (from Washington Post):
“Despite a...
