• Flocklesscrow@lemm.ee
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      5 days ago

      The pandemic “HEROES” act (extreme fucking irony) in 2022 brought all defaulted student loans to “current.” And because they’re Federal loans, the government can still attempt to collect. And they tack on 20+ years’ interest. So for a 3k Perkins loan from 2001, they want an additional $2,750 in interest. And if you MADE PAYMENTS in the past, quelle surprise, they have no record of that.

      And instead of being able to talk to the actual Dept of Education, they’ve placed collection agencies like ECSI as their front of house. ECSI will say, only the school can dismiss these charges. So you contact your school, the school expresses incredulity, reaches out to ECSI to tell them the debt has been written off, and then ECSI (aka DoEd) says, nuh-uh.

      It’s a system designed to resolve nothing while putting people over a cheese grater from loans they didn’t even need from 2 decades ago.