Analysis: Is the U.S. Student Loan Program Facing a $500 Billion Hole? One Banker Thinks So
In 2018, Betsy DeVos, then U.S. education secretary, called JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Jamie Dimon for help. Repayments on federal student loans had come in persistently below projections. Did Dimon know someone who could sort through the finances to determine just how much trouble borrowers were in? Months later, Jeff Courtney, a former JPMorgan executive, arrived in Washington. And that’s when the trouble started, according to an analysis in the Wall Street Journal. According to a report he later produced, over three decades Congress, various administrations and federal watchdogs had systematically made the student loan program look profitable when in fact defaults were becoming more likely. The result, he found, was a growing gap between what the books said and what the loans were actually worth, requiring cash infusions from the Treasury to the Education Department long after budgets had been approved and fiscal years had ended, and potentially hundreds of billions in losses. The federal budget assumes the government will recover 96 cents of every dollar borrowers default on. In reality, the government is likely to recover just 51% to 63% of defaulted amounts, according to Courtney’s forecast in a 144-page report of his findings, which was reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. Courtney’s calculation was one of several supporting the disclosure in a Journal article last fall that taxpayers could ultimately be on the hook for roughly a third of the $1.6 trillion federal student loan portfolio. This could amount to more than $500 billion, exceeding what taxpayers lost on the savings-and-loan crisis 30 years ago, according to the analysis. [as reported in Credit and Collection 042921 e-newsletter]