The College Investor Audio Show

The Federal Reserve’s G.19 consumer credit release published September 8 put outstanding student loan debt at $1,858.2 billion at the end of the second quarter of 2026. That is up $55.6 billion from $1,802.6 billion a year earlier, a 3.1% increase. This is also the first time the national student loan balance has gone above $1.85 trillion.

Total consumer credit grew at a 4.2% seasonally adjusted annual rate in July to $5.19 trillion. Federally held consumer credit (Direct Loans, Perkins, and Ed-held FFEL) was $1,605.6 billion, roughly flat since March, even as millions of borrowers move onto new repayment plans.

It’s important to reme...

Reps. Bill Foster (D-IL) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) introduced the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Inclusion Act of 2026, which would update what counts as a qualifying payment under Public Service Loan Forgiveness in two ways: it would let payments under graduated, extended, and the new tiered standard plans count during a borrower’s first 60 months, and it would treat months spent in administrative forbearance as qualifying payments for borrowers working in public service.

It was referred to the House Committee on Education and Workforce the same day it was introduced, with nine cosponsors.

This first provision is...

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 960 and Assembly Bill 2694 on September 18, 2026, rewriting the rules for bachelor’s degrees at California community colleges. Starting January 1, 2028, each district’s allowance of new bachelor’s programs will range from 2 to 12, and the number depends on how many of its students finish or transfer.

The two measures, by Sen. Christopher Cabaldon (D-Napa) and Assemblymember David Alvarez (D-San Diego), are legally joined: SB 960 states it takes effect only if AB 2694 is also enacted. Newsom’s office listed both as signed in its September 18 legislative update.

They replace the framework set by AB 92...

Several of the most selective colleges have adopted generous financial aid policies that provide free tuition to low- and moderate-income students. Depending on the college, the income threshold for free tuition ranges from $100,000 to $250,000.

MIT was the first to offer free tuition for families with income under $200,000 starting with the 2025-2026 academic year. Harvard matched the offer within months. Since then, other colleges have announced similar policies for the 2026-2027 academic year, including Rice at $200,000 and the University of Chicago at $250,000.

Here’s a ranked list of the top offers, why colleges are doing this, an...

A bipartisan House bill would add farm and ranch work to the list of jobs eligible for Public Service Loan Forgiveness. H.R. 9974, the Young Farmer Success Act, was introduced by Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-PA) alongside Reps. Joe Courtney (D-CT), Monica De La Cruz (R-TX), and Nikki Budzinski (D-IL), and referred to the House Committee on Education and Workforce.

The text of the bill amends Section 455(m)(3)(B) of the Higher Education Act to treat full-time work as an “employee or manager of a qualified farm or ranch” as a public service job. A qualified operation is one...

The Treasury Department and IRS released proposed regulations that would deny 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status to any private school that “adopts, maintains, or enforces” a policy discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national or ethnic origin, including policies designed to benefit minority students.

The proposed rule focuses on admissions, scholarships, student loans, athletics, and every other school-administered program. The agencies estimate it could affect as many as 18,000 private schools and roughly 750,000 students who may qualify for race-based scholarships. This is happening as the Trump Administration is pushing back against race-conscious education policy.

“Schools rebranding race-b...

Both fall quarter sections of MATH 2 at UC San Diego are full, and 175 students are sitting on waitlists. A screenshot of the campus booking system posted this week to the r/UCSD subreddit shows one 180-seat section at zero availability with 99 waitlisted, and a second 10-seat section with 76 more waiting. That puts roughly 365 incoming students in or chasing a class that awards no degree credit. This aligns with what the college reported last year about collapsing freshman math skills.

MATH 2 sits below precalculus. The UC San Diego course catalog describes it as “Introduction to College Mathematics,” a four...

Texas State University is doubling the income limits on its free tuition program. Starting with the Fall 2027 entering class, first-time freshmen who graduate in the top 25% of their high school class and have a family adjusted gross income of $100,000 or less will qualify for free tuition and mandatory fees under the expanded Bobcat Promise.

That makes Texas State a part of a growing list of colleges that have made tuition free for qualifying families.

The university expects the expansion to benefit roughly 3,400 incoming freshmen. Students from families earning $50,000 or less remain eligible regardless of class...

Bill Gates published a 6,000-word essay on the AI transition, calling it “one of the most turbulent times in human history” and arguing the world has no real plan for it. He organizes the essay around three key risks (permanent job losses, AI-empowered bad actors, and damage to how kids develop and their education), at a moment when AI anxiety is already boiling over on campuses.

The line that should stop educators cold: Gates writes that the same tool that will allow people to learn more than ever “could also lead to many people learning less.”

He poi...

Arizona State University has launched a Bachelor of Arts in Content Creation through its Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, available at its downtown Phoenix campus, online, and through ASU Local. Coursework covers video and podcast production, audience analytics, brand voice, monetization, copyright, plus hands-on work through a Los Angeles Content Studio and brand content projects.

Critics immediately branded it the “influencer degree,” reviving the debate over whether college is worth the investment at all.

According to reporting from the Associated Press, the curriculum overlaps heavily with ASU’s existing mass communication degree, with t...

A new NBER working paper finds that Tennessee Promise, the nation’s first statewide free community college program, increased college enrollment, boosted degree completion, raised early-career earnings, and generated enough new tax revenue to more than cover its cost. The researchers estimate the program’s marginal value of public funds is infinite, meaning every public dollar spent produced positive benefits at no net cost to the government.

The study, from economists at the University of Tennessee, Saint Mary’s College of California, and the Tennessee Office of Evidence and Impact, tracks the program from its 2009 single-county pilot in Kno...

Four Senate Democrats want the Department of Education to provide answers on how it spent a $1 billion student loan administration fund created by last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. In a September 2 letter to Education Secretary Linda McMahon (PDF File), Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) say the agency has already spent roughly $216 million from the fund without explaining what it spent them money on. Meanwhile, the number of borrowers in default has climbed to a record high.

The $216 million figure comes from the Department of...

Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) reintroduced the Streamlining Income-driven, Manageable Payments on Loans for Education (SIMPLE) Act on September 2, 2026, with six House Democratic cosponsors. The bill (H.R. 10220) would require the Department of Education to contact federal borrowers once they are 31 days past due, show them what they would owe under every income-driven repayment plan they qualify for, and then move them into the lowest-payment plan automatically if they are still delinquent at 75 days.

The bill has been sent to the House Education and Workforce Committee and the Ways and Means Committee. NASFAA reports a similar bill was...

College athletes are getting paid, and many of them don’t know what to do with it to maximize their long term wealth. The money arrives with no tax withheld, no benefits attached, no HR department explaining anything, and a set of rules that punish anyone who assumes a paycheck is a paycheck.

The window is short, too. NCAA data puts the odds of a draft-eligible football player getting drafted at 1.4%, and men’s basketball at 1.0%, while the NCAA’s own GOALS research found roughly 74% of FBS football players believe they’ll go pro. That gap is where th...

The Education Department has quietly changed how it decides whether continuing graduate students can still borrow uncapped Grad PLUS loans, and the change is already generating denials for students who have been enrolled.

During an August 12 Federal Student Aid webinar on the implementation of new loan limits and the interim exception for continuing students, FSA staff told schools to calculate “expected time to credential” using credit hours completed rather than time enrolled. That formula determines how much longer a grandfathered borrower keeps access to Grad PLUS after the program formally ended on July 1, 2026.

The National Asso...

As of July 1, 2026, new Parent PLUS borrowers are capped at $20,000 per dependent student per year and $65,000 for that student's entire undergraduate career. Before this change, Parent PLUS went all the way up to the school's full certified cost of attendance.

For families at expensive schools, that program was the entire plan. It closed whatever the aid package didn't, and it did so without much scrutiny. The problem you notice - $20,000 per year doesn’t translate to $65,000 if your child attends college for 4 or even 5 years… that’s a problem.

In partnership with Student Choice, we’re going...

Borrowers chasing Public Service Loan Forgiveness have spent the past two weeks watching their qualifying payment counts move in the wrong direction. Some lost six months. Some lost more.

The fear running through borrower forums is that the Trump administration is quietly unwinding PSLF, or reversing the one-time income-driven repayment account adjustment that brought millions of borrowers years closer to forgiveness. Based on the accounts we’ve reviewed and what the Department has confirmed on the record, that is not what’s happening.

What is happening is narrower, more technical, and because the Department has expl...

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) announced on August 17 that he will introduce the Stop Social Security Garnishment Act of 2026, a bill that would permanently bar the federal government from seizing Social Security payments to collect defaulted federal student loans. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Ed Markey (D-MA) are cosponsoring the bill, which comes as more than 9 million borrowers are in default (nearly 1 in 4 Americans with federal student loans).

The bill itself (PDF File) amends Title IV of the Higher Education Act to add a new Section 493E, which states that no payments due under the Social Security Act...

College is not a risk-free investment - and one $15-a-month decision can save families from a five-figure mistake. GradGuard CEO John Fees breaks down the hidden risks most parents never budget for, from tuition loss and academic fees to dorm fires, theft, and accidental damage that can turn move-in season into a financial disaster.

Host Robert Farrington and John Fees get specific about what actually happens when a student leaves school for medical or mental health reasons, why one in three freshmen don’t return, and why the most important college costs are often the ones schools do...

The U.S. Department of Education released a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on August 19, 2026 that would rewrite the rules governing how college accreditors are recognized. Accreditors are the private organizations that decide which schools can access federal student aid.

The proposal has a 30-day comment window, half the 60 days the Department often allows, which puts the deadline around late September. If you’ve followed how Education Department rulemaking works, you’ll notice the compressed timeline as a signal the Department wants this finished fast.

The urgency is because this rule is one of the last regu...

The U.S. Department of Education filed its reply brief in support of its motion to dismiss in Havens v. U.S. Department of Education on August 17, 2026, closing out the briefing schedule in the last lawsuit still trying to revive REPAYE for roughly 7 million former SAVE borrowers. The filing asks the judge to dismiss the case.

Hours earlier, the Education Department’s lawyers filed a Notice of Corrected Filings walking back a factual claim the agency made on July 29. In an earlier brief, the Department told the court that four of five non-party borrowers who submitted declarations “most...

The Education Department has quietly changed how it decides whether continuing graduate students can still borrow uncapped Grad PLUS loans, and the change is already generating denials for students who have been enrolled.

During an August 12 Federal Student Aid webinar on the implementation of new loan limits and the interim exception for continuing students, FSA staff told schools to calculate “expected time to credential” using credit hours completed rather than time enrolled. That formula determines how much longer a grandfathered borrower keeps access to Grad PLUS after the program formally ended on July 1, 2026.

The National Asso...

American families spent an average of $34,019 on college during the 2025-26 academic year, a 10% increase from $30,837 the year before, according to the annual Salie Mae and Ipsos study How America Pays for College 2026.

The increase far outpaced published tuition increases, yet families are not backing away from higher education: 91% call college a valuable investment in their student's future, and 84% say they are confident they made the right financial decisions to pay for it.

The 19th edition of the study, based on online surveys of 1,000 undergraduate students and 1,000 parents, arrives at a turning point for college...

A coalition of four major unions (the AFL-CIO, AFSCME, the American Federation of Teachers, and National Nurses United) filed a lawsuit on August 11, 2026 (PDF File) in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia challenging the Department of Education's Reimagining and Improving Student Education (RISE) rule on setting graduate versus professional student loan limits.

The complaint asks the court to vacate the rule's definition of "professional student" — the definition that determines whether a graduate borrower can access $50,000 per year and $200,000 total in federal loans, or just $20,500 per year and $100,000 total.

The unions collectively re...

An estimated 51.7 million children (91.7% of everyone eligible to enroll in a K-12 school) meet the income test to receive scholarships under the Education Freedom Tax Credit, the federal program launching January 1, 2027, according to a new report released Tuesday by the American Federation for Children.

The analysis is the first state-by-state estimate of who can actually receive money from the program, built on Census population estimates, American Community Survey microdata, and HUD income limits.

The credit was created as Section 25F of the tax code by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the same 2025 law that...

The Department of Education's Office of Inspector General has put hard numbers on the Trump administration's push to dismantle the agency, and the findings for Federal Student Aid are stark: entire sub-offices responsible for overseeing loan servicers and certifying schools for federal aid were left with no employees at all.

The report lands as the Department reverses course. FSA is now hiring roughly 380 workers back and held a two-day hiring fair in Washington, D.C. on July 21 and 22 to fill more than 100 open roles.

The flash report covers changes to ED's staffing, operations, contracts, and...

A bipartisan group of senators is moving to block at least some of the Trump administration's effort to dismantle the Department of Education.

The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee approved S. 5046 on Thursday by a 13-9 vote, sending it to the full Senate. The bill, introduced July 21 by Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) with Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), would bar the Education Secretary from offloading four of the department's offices onto other agencies.

This comes a little more than two weeks after House Republicans sought to make the dismantling permanent...

A bill moving quietly through the Senate would let colleges steer students toward state-run and nonprofit student loans without triggering the federal conflict-of-interest rules Congress wrote after the 2007 financial aid kickback scandal.

Nearly two decades ago, investigators found that the people students trusted most to give neutral advice (their college financial aid officers) were quietly working for the other side of the table. Financial aid officers held stock in the lenders they recommended. Lenders paid schools a cut of the loan volume they steered. Some financial aid offices let lender employees answer their phones.

Because...

Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) and Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.) held a press conference on Capitol Hill last week urging Congress to take up the Student Loan Interest Elimination Act (PDF File), which would set the rate on every existing and future federal student loan to 0%.

The press conference marks the lawmakers' second attempt in 2026 to move the bill. Welch introduced S. 4169 in the Senate and Courtney introduced H.R. 8045 in the House back on March 24, 2026, and neither version has advanced out of committee in the four months since. We covered that introduction when it happened.

...

Howard University unenrolled 502 incoming freshmen on July 22, weeks before move-in. It has since readmitted more than 200 of them — a roughly 40% reversal of its own decisions. That number alone tells you the university got this wrong. These are families who had already committed to a school where the cost of attendance runs past $66,000 a year.

The handling of this entire saga was worse than the decision. Students learned by email that they had lost seats they had spent years earning. Families could not get through by phone. The deadline Howard enforced does not appear on its public-facing pages, an...

Think about everything your family pays to protect. The phone gets a protection plan at checkout. The car carries full coverage at an average of $2,237 a year, according to Insurify. Even the spring break trip gets travel insurance, which Forbes puts at 4% to 6% of the trip cost.

Then tuition comes due (for many families, the largest single payment they ever make) and it goes out the door with no protection at all. If the semester falls apart in week six because of mononucleosis, a concussion, or a mental health crisis, most families discover the refund policy the...

Borrowers who believed the student loan payment pause would keep getting extended (or that their debt would be forgiven outright) cut their payments, spent more, and are now more likely to be delinquent, according to a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper.

Economists surveyed borrowers about their expectations during the pause and the 2022 forgiveness announcement, then linked those responses to credit bureau, employment, and spending data.

The key finding: policy uncertainty itself changed borrower behavior, and the costs are still showing up in student loan debt statistics today.

SoFi Technologies told federal securities regulators that its private student loans can be wiped out in bankruptcy under certain conditions, a quiet admission that cuts against one of the most repeated lines in personal finance.

The disclosure sits in SoFi's annual report (a Form 10-K filed with the SEC) for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2025. In the Risk Factors section, the company warns investors that its "private education loans may be discharged in bankruptcy in certain situations," including when a court finds the debt is not a qualified education loan or that repayment would cause undue hardship...

Student loan borrowers serviced by MOHELA spent this weekend staring at delinquency notices they say should not exist. Accounts that showed $0 due and active SAVE forbearance on Friday flipped to past-due balances ranging from roughly $2,000 to more than $6,700, with some borrowers marked as many as 12 months behind.

MOHELA's phone lines are closed on weekends, leaving affected borrowers with no way to reach a human until Monday. The company is one of five servicers handling the federal loan portfolio.

Federal student loan borrowers are reporting a new email from the Department of Education telling them their income-driven repayment application produced an incorrect monthly payment because of an error and that they have to submit an entirely new IDR application to fix it.

The email lands in the middle of the tightest deadline window borrowers have faced in years. The Department began sending 90-day notices to more than seven million SAVE plan borrowers on July 1, which puts the decision deadline for the first wave of them at September 29. Anyone forced to reapply is losing days they don't...

Senator Elizabeth Warren pressed Deputy Treasury Secretary nominee Francis Brooke at a Senate Finance Committee hearing over whether the Treasury Department will resume garnishing Social Security benefits for seniors with defaulted student loans.

In the exchange, Brooke could not say how many borrowers are in default and declined to commit to keeping the current pause on Social Security offsets in place.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit unanimously rejected (PDF File) the Department of Education's appeal to delay student loan relief for more than 170,000 borrowers under the Sweet v. McMahon borrower defense settlement, affirming the district court's ruling on July 17, 2026.

The judges found the Department failed to show the "changed circumstances" legally required to modify a settlement it agreed to in 2022 and said the agency knew exactly what it was signing up for.

More than 7 million student loan borrowers are being pushed off the SAVE plan in the next few months, and for many, the anxiety is real: after nearly two years of forbearance, they're bracing for a monthly bill they fear they can't afford.

But we've been seeing something interesting in our comments on social media - borrowers are surprised that they can still secure a $0 monthly payment on IBR.

That makes sense. If historical patterns hold, at least 3 million of these borrowers would still qualify for a $0 monthly payment under Income-Based Repayment (IBR). They just haven't...

Federal agencies cannot terminate grants simply because a new administration decides the money no longer matches its priorities, a federal judge ruled Friday.

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani of the District of Massachusetts granted summary judgment to a coalition of 20 states, the District of Columbia, and the governors of Kansas, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania in their lawsuit against the Office of Management and Budget, Director Russell Vought, and eleven grant-making agencies, including the Departments of Justice, Agriculture, and Homeland Security, the EPA, FEMA, the National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The...

The Justice Department told a federal judge on July 14 that the last active lawsuit trying to stop the SAVE plan shutdown should be dismissed. They argue that the borrowers are suing over a potential tax bomb they ignored by not taking action in 2025, miscalculated payments, forgiveness timelines that wouldn't have made a difference due to the OBBBA, and that the rest of the case amounts to $1,320 the government has already promised to refund if it loses.

The 58-page filing in Havens v. U.S. Department of Education opposes the borrowers' request for a preliminary injunction and asks...