By Jacqui Shine. Marnie Gallowy! The Internets told me that last week—eight years after you graduated from our ol’ alma mater—that you paid off the last of your $48,000 in student loan debt. IS THAT TRUE? Are you a wizard?
Hey JShine—you found me out, I’m a wizard! My student loan debt totaled $48,000 and change ($33-ish from undergrad, and $15K from a poorly advised year in grad school). The bulk of my undergrad debt was federal student loans, but bundled in there was a nasty $8K Sallie Mae with a 12 percent interest rate. My grad school debt was also a mix of federal and private, but the private loans I got at that time were comparatively reasonable. More...

Queenie K.H. Lam & Dansja Oste with Irina Ferencz and Bernd Wächter, Portable grants and loans: An overview and their contribution to outgoing student mobility. ACA Papers on International Cooperation in Education. Bonn: Lemmens, 2013. ISBN 978-3-86856-011-4.
The portability of state grants and loans is considered one of the key elements contributing to the realisation of a European area for lifelong learning. Its centrality at the European Union level is therefore not in doubt. However, not enough is known about the conditions attached to portable grants and loans and their actual use by mobile students. A new ACA publication – Portable grants and loans: An overview and their contribution to outgoing student mobility – seeks to fill this information gap.
Analysis in this book indicates that portable state grants and loans do possess enormous “potential” for supporting outgoing student mobility. Over 25 European countries have allowed such national funds to be used outside their national borders. Among them, some 15 countries reported that their state grants and/or loans can be used, in principle, for both outgoing credit and degree mobility, offering annually at least 1.65 million students the “opportunities” to use such financial aid to study abroad. For degree mobility alone, around 60 500 students took up such opportunities. This number represents a small fraction of all the beneficiaries of student aid in Europe, but covers a substantial share of mobile students in systems that are “open for all”. More...

By Peter Walker. Practice of preventing students with non-tuition fee debts from graduating may breach consumer laws, watchdog says. The Office of Fair Trading has written to more than 170 universities and other higher education groups warning that the widespread practice of stopping students graduating or continuing with their course if they owe money over issues such as late library books or childcare services could breach consumer laws. More...

By Josh Freedman. As the number of students attending colleges and universities has steadily increased and the cost for most students has climbed even faster, student debt figures (both total and per person) have continued to get bigger. Arguments about the likelihood of a “higher education bubble” abound. Struggles with loan payments are so commonplace that hipsters in Brooklyn were struggling with loan payments way before you. The student debt issue can be overstated, and often is. Yet the concern stems from the right place: the way we currently fund a big share of our higher education system, through mortgage-style loans, is one of the worst possible ways to pay for college. More...