If you’ve been to college – and, well, given the nature of this group, that’s just about all of us – chances are you have or have had student loans. And while it seems like only yesterday that I stopped repaying mine – it was actually 1990 – the experience offers one of life’s most useful early lessons about finances.
Which is one reason I read this morning’s New York Times article – “Colleges Hiring Lenders to Field Queries on Aid” – with such great interest. Another reason was that I simply couldn’t believe that fox-guarding-the-henhouse headline could be true.
In a nutshell: Students call what are advertised to be university phone numbers to get advice about financing their educations and instead of talking to a university employee are routed to a student-loan company whose representative does nothing to dispel the misunderstanding. Instead, in some cases, they are actually required to maintain the ruse.
Welcome to Real Life 101, kids.
From the Times:
Becky Wilson, director of financial aid at Texas Tech, defended the practice of routing student financial aid questions to (loan company) Nelnet and said that the university was “trying to make the aid process as seamless as possible for students” so they do not have to deal with multiple people. She said that if call center workers identified themselves as Nelnet employees it would cause confusion and added that the university also uses “secret shoppers” (to make sure everything’s on the up-and-up).
See, they use secret shoppers to monitor the secret ringers posing as dispassionate advisors: no problem. And it’s done to save the poor kids more confusion. (Of course, what greater scruples would you expect from an institution that has no qualms about hiring a madman like Bobby Knight to mold its “student/athlete” basketball players.)
Texas Tech is not alone. Among the other universities mentioned as finding this acceptable practice are Wayne State University, Pace University and Mercy College.
New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo tells the Times that the arrangement constitutes “an inherent conflict of interest” because “a self-interested lender is providing what is purported to be unbiased advice.”
After Cuomo directed his spotlight onto these shady dealings, Mercy College had a sudden bout of conscience and now requires that callers be told the advisor works for a lender.
Bet they can handle the confusion.
By the way, if conscience alone and pressure from government overseers won’t dissuade college officials from dealing with potential students in this unseemly manner, perhaps technology will offer them a graceful exit from the game. The U.S. Army has gotten great recruitment mileage out of an online character called SGT STAR, whose underlying technology is spreading to campuses, according to this story earlier this year in Network World:
The software that powers SGT STAR was created by Next IT, a Spokane, Wash., company that specializes in self-service applications driven by artificial intelligence. Next IT began selling the ActiveAgent application one year ago, and Spokane’s Gonzaga University was the first customer, using its Spike the Bulldog mascot as a tool to increase donations from alumni, says Patrick Ream, a spokesman for Next IT. Now the university is using the tool to recruit students and answer financial aid questions, Ream says.
Tere’s no way to mistake for whom Spike works: He’s wearing a Gonzaga T-shirt.
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