August, 2019
Washington -- To make it clear at the outset: I do not have a preference for Senator Warren over Senator Bennet, or vice versa. They are both credible candidates for president.
But I can share my experiences with both on their approach to student loans.
Elizabeth Warren is a fighter and will go to great lengths to see that the government does right by its student loan borrowers. A recent article details how she took on President Obama and the Treasury Department so as to prevail over them on behalf of student loan borrowers defrauded by a shoddy for-profit college. She escalated the effort by threatening to hold up an Obama appointment. During the effort and thereafter, she got to know some of the borrowers individually and worked with them in their common efforts to provide cancellation of the fraudulent loans in question.
This is the Elizabeth Warren I know from having worked in the student loan area myself, so the article is no surprise.
My work also brought me into contact with the office of Senator Bennet. A constituent of his was having difficulty getting a loan cancelled, despite having a letter from a loan servicer that the loan was falsely certified and therefore should be discharged. The Colorado resident had found me in retirement and asked for my advice as to what steps she should take to get the matter resolved. In my career, I had resolved many such situations and agreed to try to help get resolution one way or another, whoever was right about the details of the case.
I suggested she take the letter up with her congressional delegation, which in turn would take it up with the U.S. Department of Education. She said she had already contacted Senator Bennet, who told her that the department had told him there was nothing it could do. I was familiar with this routine, which was too often just a paper-shuffling exercise with no actual review of the situation to see if the loan should be cancelled or not.
So I asked the constituent for permission to call Senator Bennet's office on her behalf, and did so. I was connected to a caseworker in his Colorado office who was familiar with the correspondence and asked what further steps the Senator might be prepared to take. None, was the answer. I said in my experience, issues like these need to be raised to a higher level to show that the elected official cannot be brushed off. The caseworker asked what that might entail. I said it would likely require someone higher up in the office, and perhaps the Senator himself, to insist on a thorough review on behalf of the constituent, sending a message that the issue would not go away until he got a reply that would include a full explanation. The caseworker said that would be too much, and declined. To my knowledge, the constituent's issue has never been resolved.
Meanwhile, student loan servicing generally has become a public policy crisis, with three House committees working jointly to investigate it in preparation for a hearing on September 10th before the House Financial Services Committee.
The purpose of this post is not to favor one candidate over the other, but to illustrate how problems can either be solved or allowed to fester. I admire Senator Bennet's work in other areas and consider him an excellent candidate with extensive experience both as an executive and as a legislator. But Senator Warren's work in student loans is remarkable and should not go unnoticed.
