Student Union
Student Debtor Forgiven $220,000 in School Loans
A judge in bankruptcy court has ruled in favor of a law school graduate who asked to have more than $220,000 in student debt erased.
The case is notable because student debt is commonly thought to be unforgivable in bankruptcy cases, a lament of many students who leave college saying they are too financially burdened to advance the milestones of adulthood, like buying property or having children.
But borrower Kevin J. Rosenberg, 46, of Beacon, N.Y., asked the court to forgive his student debt because repaying the loans was impossible and created an undue hardship, the legal test of whether a debtor should be forgiven.
Rosenberg’s student debt commenced in 1993, when he enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of Arizona, according to court documents. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in history, he served in the U.S. Navy on active duty for five years.
He then attended Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York from 2001 to 2004. His degrees were financed by student loans.
When he graduated from law school in April 2005, he consolidated his debts with a nonprofit corporation called Educational Credit Management Corp., (ECMC), owing $116,464 in principle on the loan amount before interest. But by November 19, 2019, the 3.38% interest rate expanded that loan debt to $221,385.
Rosenberg is among a small percentage of student debtors – 2% -- who owe most of the nation’s $1.7 trillion student debt. This group borrowed money to pay for expensive graduate school programs, like law and medicine.
The average loan debt for law school graduates in 2012 was between $84,600 and $122,158, according to the American Bar Association. Almost 70% of law school graduates in 2016 left with student debt, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
ECMC -- a nonprofit lender organization headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota -- argued that Rosenberg did not meet the undue hardship standard. They cited his age (45), health, lack of dependents, two degrees, and law licenses in New York and New Jersey in their legal brief.“
Shortly after starting his first job as an associate attorney at a law firm, [Rosenberg] decided that practicing law was not for him, because he disliked working in an office and did not find the work interesting,” New Jersey attorney Kenneth Baum, who represented ECMC, wrote in his court brief.
"Thus, after leaving that job after only 2½ months, [Rosenberg], with the exception of a brief period of working as a part-time contract attorney on a project basis – which [he] likened to working as a paralegal – has not sought any employment in the legal profession and has no intention of ever doing so, despite the fact that opportunities abound for Plaintiff to make a very respectable living in the legal profession," Baum wrote.
Rosenberg was quoted in Yahoo Finance on January 12, saying, “First of all, I realized the whole job is sitting in the office by yourself. You can't be creative at all, but also that you either help people out or you make a good living -- you can't do both. And I kind of had a problem with that.”
But Rosenberg told VOA that his hardship was caused by the collapse in the bricks-and-mortar retail industry in 2017, when a shop he owned in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York City, failed because consumers made their purchases online.
"I left the law in 2005 and filed for bankruptcy in 2018," Rosenberg told VOA in email and by phone. "In between, I was able to launch a business as a street vendor and grow it into a small shop, and then with the help of an investor, a much larger shop that was nationally recognized, before brick & mortar retail collapsed in 2017. It was nation’s switch to ecommerce and the collapse of retail that directly caused my bankruptcy."
Judge Cecelia G. Morris, chief U.S. Bankruptcy judge in the Southern District of New York, agreed with Rosenberg. She used the student-debt test case, Brunner v N.Y. State Higher Education Services Corp., from 1987 differently than other decisions. “
Brunner has received a lot of criticism for creating too high of a burden for most bankruptcy petitioners to meet,” Morris wrote. For Brunner, who filed for bankruptcy within a year of graduation, “the test is difficult to meet,” she wrote. “
However, for a multitude of petitioners like Mr. Rosenberg, who have been out of school and struggling with student loan debt for many years, the test itself is fairly straightforward and simple," she said.
Rosenberg was relieved of his debt.
Student-loan experts say that most students are under the impression that student debt cannot be relieved in bankruptcy court. Some get bad advice from attorneys who also believe student debt cannot be forgiven in bankruptcy court. “
You can't discharge student loan debt in bankruptcy: That was the prevailing wisdom,” said Jason Iuliano, an expert in student debt and assistant professor of law at Villanova University in suburban Philadelphia.
But Iuliano, whose own student debt was hundreds of thousands of dollars after receiving degrees from Harvard University and Princeton University, dove into the caseload and found that wasn’t true. “
What I found when I actually went in and collected the cases was a lot of folks actually do meet the [undue hardship] test,” he said. “About 40% of the student loan debtors in bankruptcy … are successful in getting a discharge of some sort. And that struck me as really important.”
Iuliano said about 250,000 student debtors file for bankruptcy each year. But only about 500 of them take a necessary additional legal step – an adversary proceeding - to address college-loan specific debt. Only 1% end up going in front of a judge.
"A lot more people should be filing and trying to prove undue hardship, because they would be successful if they actually came before a judge,” Iuliano advised.
Ashley Harrington, senior policy counsel for the Center for Responsible Lending, celebrated the decision, but said student debt that impacts low-income and minority borrowers more than any others should be addressed long before debtors end up with interest-bloated loans. “
My initial thought was, ‘This is great, good for him.’ We’ve always supported student-loan discharge of both private and federal loans,” Harrington said. “But, there still is a need for Congress to do something about it.”
Among students in the Class of 2016, 70% borrowed an average of $30,000, Harrington said.“
People are really struggling under this debt for a very long time. Your repayment term is 20 to 25 years, and that’s as long as some people’s mortgages," she said.“
Part of the conversation is changing in judicial chambers because everyone is realizing what a crisis this is, seeing how it effects students’ lives,” Harrington added. “How much help have you given them?”
Rosenberg said he is frustrated by "some folks [who] come away acting like my case was a scheme to get out of a bad decision and it wasn’t.
"I did everything I could to avoid bankruptcy and tried to work things out with the lenders but they refused to budge ... I only filed for bankruptcy when I had no other realistic option."
ECMC has the right to appeal the decision. Spokesperson Laura Telander Graf emailed VOA that “We are reviewing the ruling to determine how we will proceed.”
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Members of a U.S. presidential advisory council have approved a student exchange deal between an American college and a Nigerian university as part of the council's effort to strengthen collaboration on education, health, entrepreneurship and development between Africa and Africans living abroad.
The council also visited a health facility supported by the United States Agency for International Development in the capital.
Nigerian authorities and visitors chatted with members of the U.S President's Advisory Council on African Diaspora Engagement as they toured a healthcare facility in Karu, a suburb of Abuja, on the last day of the council's three-day visit to Abuja and Lagos.
The facility is one of many supported by the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, to improve the management of childhood illnesses, family planning, immunization and delivery.
The tour was part of the council's effort to promote African diaspora-led investments in technology entrepreneurship, education and healthcare delivery.
"They're doing a phenomenal job there, it really gave us a sense of what the healthcare system is in Nigeria," said Deniece Laurent-Mantey, executive director of the advisory council. "This is our first trip as a council to the continent and we chose Nigeria for a reason — the diaspora in Nigeria is very active, very influential, and they're really a source of strength when it comes to our U.S.-Africa policy. And so for us coming to Nigeria was very intentional."
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Akila Udoji, manager of the Primary Healthcare Centre of Karu, said officials in Nigeria were pleased that the council members were able to visit.
"We're happy that they have seen what the money they have given to us to work with has been used to do, because they have been able to assist us in capacity-building, trainings, equipment supply and the makeover of the facility," Udoji said.
Earlier, the council signed a deal for a student exchange program between Spelman College in the southern U.S. city of Atlanta and Nigeria's University of Lagos.
Laurent-Mantey said education exchanges are one of the council's top priorities.
"In Lagos, we had the president of Spelman College — she's also a member of our council — she signed an agreement with the University of Lagos to further education exchange programs in STEM and creative industries between those two universities," Laurent-Mantey said. "And I think for us it's very important, because Spelman College is a historically Black university, and so here we are promoting the importance of collaboration between African Americans and Africans."
In March, the advisory council adopted its first set of recommendations for the U.S. president, including the student exchange initiative, advocating for more U.S. government support for Africa, climate-focused initiatives, and improving U.S. visa access for Africans.
The council met with Nigerian health and foreign affairs officials during the visit before leaving the country on Wednesday.
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5 killed, dozens injured in clashes over Bangladesh jobs quota system
At least 5 people were killed and dozens injured in two separate incidents in Bangladesh as violence continued Tuesday on university campuses in the nation's capital and elsewhere over a government jobs quota system, local media reports said quoting officials.
At least three of the dead were students and one was a pedestrian, the media reports said. Another man who died in Dhaka remained unidentified.
The deaths were reported Tuesday after overnight violence at a public university near Bangladesh's capital, Dhaka. The violence involved members of a pro-government student body and other students, when police fired tear gas and charged the protesters with batons during the clashes, which spread at Jahangir Nagar University in Savar, outside Dhaka, according to students and authorities.
Protesters have been demanding an end to a quota reserved for family members of veterans who fought in Bangladesh's war of independence in 1971, which allows them to take up 30% of governmental jobs.
They argue that quota appointments are discriminatory and should be merit-based. Some said the current system benefits groups supporting Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. Some Cabinet ministers criticized the protesters, saying they played on students' emotions.
The Bengali-language Prothom Alo daily newspaper reported that one person died in Dhaka and three others, including a pedestrian, were killed after they suffered injuries during violence in Chattogram, a southeastern district, on Tuesday.
Prothom Alo and other media reports also said that a 22-year-old protester died in the northern district of Rangpur.
Details of the casualties could not be confirmed immediately.
While job opportunities have expanded in Bangladesh's private sector, many find government jobs stable and lucrative. Each year, some 3,000 such jobs open up to nearly 400,000 graduates.
Hasina said Tuesday that war veterans — commonly known as "freedom fighters" — should receive the highest respect for their sacrifice in 1971 regardless of their current political ideologies.
"Abandoning the dream of their own life, leaving behind their families, parents and everything, they joined the war with whatever they had," she said during an event at her office in Dhaka.
Protesters gathered in front of the university's official residence of the vice chancellor early Tuesday when violence broke out. Demonstrators accused the Bangladesh Chhatra League, a student wing of Hasina's ruling Awami League party, of attacking their "peaceful protests." According to local media reports, police and the ruling party-backed student wing attacked the protesters.
But Abdullahil Kafi, a senior police official, told the country's leading English-language newspaper Daily Star that they fired tear gas and "blank rounds" as protesters attacked the police. He said up to 15 police officers were injured.
More than 50 people were treated at Enam Medical College Hospital near Jahangir Nagar University as the violence continued for hours, said Ali Bin Solaiman, a medical officer of the hospital. He said at least 30 of them suffered pellet wounds.
On Monday, violence also spread at Dhaka University, the country's leading public university, as clashes gripped the campus in the capital. More than 100 students were injured in the clashes, police said.
On Tuesday, protesters blocked railways and some highways across the country, and in Dhaka, they halted traffic in many areas as they vowed to continue demonstrating until the demands were met.
Local media said police forces were spread across the capital to safeguard the peace.
Swapon, a protester and student at Dhaka University who gave only his first name, said they want the "rational reformation of the quota scheme." He said that after studying for six years, if he can't find a job, "it will cause me and my family to suffer."
Protesters say they are apolitical, but leaders of the ruling parties accused the opposition of using the demonstrations for political gains.
A ruling party-backed student activist, who refused to give his name, told The Associated Press that the protesters with the help of "goons" of the opposition's Bangladesh Nationalist Party and Jamaat-e-Islami party vandalized their rooms at the student dormitories near the Curzon Hall of Dhaka University.
The family-of-the-veterans quota system was halted following a court order after mass student protests in 2018. But last month, Bangladesh's High Court nulled the decision to reinstate the system once more, angering scores of students and triggering protests.
Last week, the Supreme Court suspended the High Court's order for four weeks and the chief justice asked protesting students to return to their classes, saying the court would issue a decision in four weeks.
However, the protests have continued daily, halting traffic in Dhaka.
The quota system also reserves government jobs for women, disabled people and ethnic minority groups, but students have protested against only the veterans system.
Hasina maintained power in an election in January that was again boycotted by the country's main opposition party and its allies due to Hasina's refusal to step down and hand over power to a caretaker government to oversee the election.
Her party favors keeping the quota for the families of the 1971 war heroes after her Awami League party, under the leadership of her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, led the independence war with the help of India. Rahman was assassinated along with most of his family members in a military coup in 1975.
