Student Loans

A new report points to troubling flaws with the Parent PLUS loan program.

• By Dwyer Gunn

Brown hopes to raise $30 million by December in order to eliminate loans starting in the 2018–19 academic year.

• By Elena Gooray

The regulations sought to protect student loan borrowers.

• By Elena Gooray

James Runcie submitted his resignation following an apparent disagreement with Betsy DeVos over his scheduled testimony on improper aid payments.

• By Elena Gooray

Think withholding taxes is an easy fix to America’s mess of a student loan re-payment system? Alex Holt explains why you should probably think again.

• By Alex Holt

Young, broke, and desperate, I worked at the heart of an emerging nationwide scandal in higher education. Here's what I saw.

• By Michael Fitzgerald

An early look at a Pacific Standard story that's currently only available to subscribers.

• By Pacific Standard Staff

Unlike most of the school-loan borrowers who make it into the news, the most severely delinquent borrowers tend to have low balances and low monthly payments.

• By Francie Diep

For many universities and colleges, both public and private, it’s their most embarrassing secret—paying educated professionals minimum wage salaries with no benefits.

• By Ana Beatriz Cholo

New Department of Education data shows rising default rates on federal loans to parents.

• By Marian Wang

In what’s been criticized as a modern-day version of indentured servitude, a new batch of start-ups are giving investors the opportunity to turn people into profit by buying a piece of their future earnings. Could this be a solution to our student debt problem?

• By Kyle Chayka

For-profit higher education's failings have the feds exercised anew. If only there was some way to know who might thrive in these institutions....

• By Michael Todd

We celebrate education as the answer to almost all of our economic problems. At the same time, we largely ignore the enormous debt many American students are forced to acquire and the great difficulties they face in landing a job that makes it possible for them to pay it off.

• By Martin Hart-Landsberg

Four destinations across the Web that Pacific Standard staffers find themselves returning to again and again.

• By Pacific Standard Staff

A new study from The New America Foundation makes it clear why so many schools have fought efforts for greater transparency when it comes to financial aid.

• By Elvina Nawaguna

Wesleyan University wants to graduate some students in just three years, saving them (or their parents) thousands in tuition costs. Is this a brave idea—or a blasphemous one?

• By Kevin Charles Fleming