Taxpayers Face $435 Billion in Student-Loan Losses, Already Baked in: Leaked Education-Department Study

by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street

Most of the losses come from established income-based repayment programs that include debt forgiveness at the end. No one has ever put a number to it until now.

In 2009, the US government entered the business of reckless, no-matter-what lending to students, even to older students with subprime credit ratings and to students at iffy for-profit colleges with dubious degree programs. And then tuition soared, and student housing went upscale and became a global asset class with its own commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) that are now experiencing record delinquency rates. And Apple and textbook publishers and everyone began feeding at the big trough, with students just being the conduit for this money. Student-loan balances on the government’s financial statement skyrocketed from $147 billion in 2009 to $1.37 trillion at the beginning of 2020, despite the 11% decline in student enrollment since 2011.

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