No funds to lend to 40,000 students

[flashl]

State authority runs dry as start of college nears

By Beth Healy
Globe Staff / July 29, 2008

The Massachusetts Educational Financing Authority yesterday said it will not be able to provide student loans this fall for the first time in its 26-year history, leaving more than 40,000 families without an important source of tuition funds just weeks before college classes begin.

The nonprofit lending authority, which last school year provided $510 million in loans, said it has been unable to secure funding to provide private student loans due to the ongoing turmoil in the nation's credit markets. The agency had already disclosed in April that it would no longer offer federally backed student loans.

It is now contacting the tens of thousands of students to whom it has made loans in the past, urging them to seek other options.

"As a result of our problems and the continued dislocation of the capital markets, we have been unable to raise funds for the coming academic year," said Thomas M. Graf, the authority's executive director.

[zazen]

1. What's Target gonna do with its huge new back-to-college line?

I know they're not the bad guys, for the most part, but I was in there yesterday and they are so obviously plugging "the college life" as a new marketing theme to get us to buy furniture that we'd otherwise get second and third hand from relatives (which had a deeper meaning and character to it, didn't it?). I know, I know . . "in _my_ day . . . "

I was wondering why they think the college-aged spending population is expanding when the student loan cash pool is shrinking. Governments that want to keep people out of the labor pool for a while keep them in school, but ours isn't thinking that far ahead.

I wonder if the "dorm style" furniture is for the formerly middle class families shopping in there, like moi.