interviews
Who Profits from Your Student Loans?
by Cody Hounanian
September 27, 2020
This interview with Cody Hounanian, the Program Director of Student Debt Crisis, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | What does the student debt crisis look like today?
Cody | I think statistics can tell part of the story. For example, in the seventies, you could use a Pell Grant to cover most of your college expenses, now you can’t. Anecdotes tell another part of the story. In the past, a part-time job over summer could be used to cover the cost of college. That is not enough anymore. We hear from borrowers every day who work many, many hours while going to school, and that still doesn't cover even a fraction of what higher education costs today.
As a society, we used to be much more willing to invest in covering the cost of education. Over the years, and particularly since the Great Recession, investment at the state, local and federal levels has decreased. As a society, we pulled back from investing in students and left families and individuals to pick up that burden. It's an investment issue. It's also a cost issue.
Can you speak more to the cost issue — why is college so expensive?
There are expenses to operate a major modern higher education institution — especially at the level that we have in the United States. But our political leaders have decided to not invest money into our higher education system, and, as a result, families and students have to pick up the slack and borrow to pay for college.
It is a vicious cycle — the more that colleges increase the cost of college, the more student loans will be taken out to fund those educations. The more that we open up the opportunity for borrowers to finance their education, the more room there is for institutions to increase their costs.
That is why at Student Debt Crisis we support a two-pronged solution. One, we need to cancel a broad amount of the student debt that exists. Two, we need to make many colleges, certainly public institutions, free for students. That is critical to creating a future where the student debt crisis that we see today can’t be recreated.
Do you think that canceling student debt is politically and fiscally possible?
If you accept the premise that our higher education and student loan system are broken, then you have to accept the fact that much of the $1.7 trillion in student loan debt is unethical, immoral, and, frankly, shouldn't exist.
Since the COVID crisis, canceling student debt has gone from a rallying cry of borrowers and advocates to something that is growing in its legitimacy. It has the support of many people in Congress, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, and even presidential candidate, Joe Biden.
But there are other common-sense solutions we should look to, as well. For example, there needs to be a federal refinancing option.
Because of predatory interest rates, many people have loans where they have paid back more than they originally borrowed.
Refinancing is not a new idea — people can refinance their mortgage or auto loans.
Let’s back up — what does refinancing look like for student loans?
Anyone that takes out a traditional lending product for their home or their car, can take advantage of a lower interest rate in the future. That helps them to lower their monthly payments and the total amount of debt that they have to pay back during the lifetime of the loan.
People who have federal student loans are not given that option. Importantly, federal student loan interest rates have fluctuated wildly over the years. There are millions of people that have very high interest rates, very high monthly payments, and no option to lower their interest rates.
With the support of folks like Senator Elizabeth Warren, there have been several attempts to pass common-sense refinancing. It came within two votes of passing in Congress several years ago but did not pass.
How many people are defaulting on their student loans?
A million people each year that default on their student loans. And that does not include a large portion of borrowers who are seriously delinquent on their student loans — these are borrowers who are between 90 and 270 days past due on their payments.
Unfortunately, we see that student loan defaults follow the inequity lines that we see in our society. Black student loan borrowers default at a much higher rate than their white peers.
We also know those who attend predatory for-profit colleges, often single parents, disabled veterans, and other vulnerable communities default at a much higher rate as well.
What happens when you default on your loans?
The consequences of default can be really catastrophic. It can mean huge fees. In many states, you can have your driver's license or your professional license revoked. It can mean that you can't complete your program or access financial aid. It can even mean you can't serve in the military, law enforcement positions, or other jobs that require credit checks. It can disrupt people's lives significantly.
As with other forms of debt, defaulting on your student loans also means that you're likely going to face relentless harassment from debt collectors. These are people that call at all hours of the day, they contact your friends and family, and sometimes they reach out to you on social media accounts. Defaulting can lead to a serious encroachment of your privacy.
Right. And there are repayment options to pay off student loans in an effective way — but no one seems to know?
Nobody with a federal student loan should default. There are affordable repayment options that are available to student loan borrowers through the federal government. The problem is, no one knows that these programs exist.
For example, if you are a low-income borrower or if you are unemployed, you can qualify for a monthly payment that's as low as $0 per month, and still be considered current on your loans. But your loan servicer has to tell you about that option and they have to help you enroll properly. For years, they have failed to do that. There's been a myriad of lawsuits against these companies, but that doesn't fix the problem.
California just passed a student loan borrower “bill of rights” to create enforceable standards. These companies have to give you your options, and they have to educate you on the best options for your situation, not the options best for their bottom line.
The federal student loan system is so complex that it makes it hard for students to navigate — you essentially have to be an expert. What's really important to know is that student loan borrowers are constantly hounded by what we call debt relief companies. These are people that prey on your inability to find any information. Any company offering to enroll you in a federal program with a fee is unnecessary - you can enroll in any federal program at the Department of Education's website at no cost.
But it's not just the private companies or organizations making a profit, right? In 2013, the Department of Education made over $41.3 billion on student loans. How are they making that money?
Yeah, you're right. Hundreds of millions of dollars every year go to the Department of Education through our student loan system.
Most of that comes from the interest on student loans. I think it is important to circle back to the conversation around the lack of refinancing here — we know that the longer that student loan borrowers are stuck with high interest rates, the more the Department of Education reaps in return. That is a perverse incentive.
Those funds go towards funding other government programs. To that extent, I think this is a question about balancing our books as a country and reprioritizing what we want to spend our money on. We need to think about different means of funding that doesn't happen off of the backs of student loan borrowers.
There's literally money on the table to be used to reinvest in education that instead is just being given as a fund generator for the Department of Education.
Can you talk more about the spread between what banks are borrowing and what the interest rates are there and how that differs from private loans?
Yeah. When you think of what a bank can lend money for, you're talking about single digits a — 1% to 0.5% of an interest rate. When a student loan is written by the federal government, it can be anywhere from about 3.5%, today's rate, to 6.5%, which was the rate that it was for me when I attended college in 2013. In the private market, student loan interest rates can be in the double digits — they can be as high as 15% or more.
Federal student loan borrowers, and those with private student loans from banks, are paying much more to finance their own education than what institutions pay to buy financial products. There is a huge spread. Again, I think that is a societal ill.
What does our society prioritize? Is it more important to keep banks afloat or to help young people afford education and make the future better and more bright for our entire country?
Why is the federal system profiting off of this system and these high interest rates rather than acting as a protector against predatory private institutions?
That's a great question. About a decade ago, when a student loan borrower went to the Department of Education for a student loan, the Department of Education would help facilitate that process, but the funds came from a private bank.
During the Great Recession, the banks unloaded this portfolio, they no longer wanted these loans. A lot of the loans were sold back to the Department of Education. From then on, throughout and after the Obama administration, all new federal student loans were not only facilitated by the Department of Education, but the funds themselves came from the government through the Department of Education.
The Department of Education shifted from being a regulatory agency, to essentially acting as one of the largest banking operations within the government.
They have a portfolio of trillions of dollars in student loans. Instead of acting as an institution meant to look out for the interests of student loan borrowers, they are now incentivized to look out for their large portfolio of student loans.
Was the transition of the government towards acting as a bank a partisan led movement?
The Obama administration felt strongly that borrowers needed an easy way to finance their education, or we would have a future where the future economy was void of high skilled labor and job opportunities.
We were also coming out of the recession, and there were deficit issues. So another motivating factor was also the idea of funding — the Department of Education could process these loans and create a revenue stream that could fund other programming in the government.
Do you think the move was well-intentioned?
I would say up until recently, these programs were well-intentioned. I think there were obstacles in making substantive change. But, since Betsy DeVos has become the Secretary of Education, we've seen more of what looks like overt attempts to make sure the system is as broken as possible.
I'll give you an example, there is something called the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program. It started under the Bush administration, and the goal of the program was to motivate college graduates to work in public service by forgiving their student loan debt after 10 years of service. The current administration has proactively created roadblocks that have denied 99% of applicants to the program. There has been much more of an explicit attempt to prevent borrowers from accessing relief from the federal government — the likes of which we have never seen before.
Does the failure of the Department of Education lend itself to the idea that the government can't be in charge of things?
To those that look at the broken student loan system and say that is a great example of government failure, I would say, look to the other side of the coin — the exploitative private student loan system.
The federal government and the federal student loan system is not perfect by any means. It has created a lot of problems for student loan borrowers. However, the private student loan system that has no consumer protections when it comes to affordable payment plans. They have higher interest rates, they engage in profiteering, and a whole host of other issues that you don't see at the governmental level.
We look at the student loan system within the federal government and think that this is a bloated, broken system that can be corrected. It should be limited in size — meaning we should lower the cost of college and cancel a ton of the student debt to make this program more manageable. But we don't want borrowers to go to the private student loan industry where they lack the affordable options and consumer protections that are afforded to federal student loan borrowers. So the grass ain't greener in the private industry for student loan borrowers by any means.
Why do you think there's so much political resistance to embrace education as a public good?
This is where things are more insidious and, frankly, shameful. It comes down to the fact that there are partisan politics at play. There are some on one side of the aisle that treat a college education as something that should be reserved for the elites rather than as a public good and something that really benefits our society. At the Student Debt Crisis, we believe that America needs highly educated and highly skilled citizens who can compete globally for modern jobs.
interviews
Blockchain For Climate
by Joseph Pallant
January 29, 2020
frank | Hi Joseph! Excited to speak with you. Will you start by introducing yourself?
Joseph Pallant | Sure! My name is Joseph Pallant and I am the founder of the Blockchain for Climate Foundation – our goal is to put the Paris Agreement on the Blockchain. I am also the Director of Climate Innovation at Ecotrust Canada and a community scholar in Blockchain for Climate at the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research at York University. This confluence of roles and really is a mashup of my 15 years of work in carbon offset development, and my excitement for using emergent technology like blockchain that can help solve a bunch of the problems we encounter in the climate space.
In layman's terms, what do you mean by your “excitement for using emergent technology like blockchain that can help solve a bunch of the problems we encounter in the climate space?”
Climate has been my day job for 15 years. And about three years ago, in the spring of 2017, I read an article about blockchain and about initial coin offerings that coincided with the start of the ICO boom. It was a really long read, and by the end of it, I had three burning thoughts:
My first thought was, "Oh my gosh, I need to drop everything and get into crypto." And my second thought was, "Heck no. I have a months-old baby, a mortgage and I love my work. I really need to NOT just drop everything." Then my third thought was, "Well, if we could put the Paris Agreement on the Blockchain and operationalize Article 6 (the carbon trading aspects) of this international agreement, THAT would be the killer app for blockchain, vis a vis climate.”
You see, a major issue with achieving the vision of the Paris Agreement rests on the ability to pay for the economic transformation that needs to happen to actually beat climate change. Carbon markets and “Article 6” can help achieve this by connecting countries so that you could have capital flow from one country to another where it was more cost effective to reduce greenhouse gases, and then have environmental assets, these carbon credits called “Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes” or ITMOs under Article 6, flow back in the other direction in return. The opportunity that I saw in Blockchain was a tool built for the making and keeping of distributed ledgers, but moreover creating digitally scarce token, digitally scarce units that can be bought, sold or traded and really have that portability and verifiability of value.
So, over the next year I got to explore a lot of different models using Blockchain for selling carbon credits or for verifying and auditing of projects, but I kept coming back to where I started, focusing on this last mile of connectivity between countries to enable this key part of the Paris Agreement. We've subsequently received a lot of good feedback and buy-in on this use case, so we remain hard at work to make it a reality.
Amazing. Can you break down this portion of the Paris Agreement and who the buy-in is from? How do you get people to participate in this? I think my barrier to fully wrapping my head around how this all works is that the Paris Agreement is policy driven – and when I look at Blockchain and how Crypto works, policy seems behind.
Yeah. So. You make a really great point. Basically, the part in the Paris Agreement that we're really trying to address is Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, which lays out the rules for trading of carbon credits from one country to another. So, kind of at that simple level, the Paris Agreement sets rules around doing those trades internationally.
What we're trying to do is build a piece of infrastructure to enable that to happen, transparently and effectively.
Over the last few years, lots of people have tokenized intangible assets on the Ethereum blockchain using the “ERC20” token standard, where they're tokenizing any manner of things. We're basically building a tool allowing governments to tokenize carbon credits that they're approving for transfer out of their country.
Can you define what a carbon credit is?
At its simplest level, a carbon credit is an environmental asset created by implementing a project that reduces or removes one tonne of carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere. In our case, there's a couple of ways it could happen. But theoretically, a project developer could say… Hey - this is probably way too much detail?
No, not at all.
Ok! Thank you. If you were to do a carbon credit project here in Canada where, for example, we could go and work to improve forest management practices in a logging tenure in the province of Ontario and go from releasing a million tons of carbon dioxide per year, down to 500,000 tons per year.
After going through the credit project development and verification process you could be issuing 500,000 tons of carbon credits per year. We have well established processes for doing this domestically, and for that we don’t need the blockchain. But say now Canada wants to trade those carbon credits to Norway?
If we then take those 500,000 tons of carbon credits and sell them to Norway, their total carbon footprint is reduced by half a million tons. But what we now need to do, and this is really the crux of our work, is to make sure that Canada is adds those 500,000 tons back on to their carbon inventory and basically increase our footprint in Canada by 500,000 tons because we sold those away. Does that make sense?
So you're tokenizing the carbon credits.
Yeah. What we want to do is tokenize the 500,000 tons of carbon credits, so Canada in that issuance and tokenizing event would be taking them off of their national carbon inventory and readying them for transfer to another country.
And then why this is important is because the carbon credits might get sold to Norway, but then Norway might sell it to England might sell it to Germany, might sell to Japan. And so these units are going to be potentially, quite widely traded. And that's good in a lot of ways because it allows for a bigger market, allows for more capital invested and greenhouse gasses reduced.
Countries will be able to see how many tonnes of carbon dioxide they’ve bought and sold, and then they compare that against their actual national carbon footprint that gets calculated and reported to the UN. So, you might see Canada starting off with 730 million tons of emissions this year. And then we might sell off 5 million tons of carbon. So, we'd actually have to increase our footprint to 735 million tonnes. Then we might buy a hundred million tons of carbon credits to get us toward that Paris commitment. So then you'd subtract that off our inventory and so on. We’re excited about the building our platform because it really leverages the nature of Blockchain, natively in tokenizing that environmental outcome and making it into a digital asset. This supports clarity in that bookkeeping and clarity of ownership, all of which we're doing to support getting more capital to reducing greenhouse gases.
How did you start Blockchain for Climate? Again, how did you start getting people to buy into this idea of getting carbon credits onto the Blockchain?
There's so many different things to do in Blockchain and so many different things even to do with climate and Blockchain. I was able to really grasp a moment of clarity and focus and say, "We're just going to work on this one tool to operationalize the Paris Agreement." We had an original team of five folks, including myself, that actually met down at DCTRL, which is literally an underground cryptocurrency members club here in Vancouver, British Columbia. So, we met there, I think, in December, 2017 to just kind of talk about what was going on here.
Basically that initial team came together and then we kept it at five for about another year because we were still just sort of fleshing out exactly what we needed to do. We had an early blockchain developer, a person from the climate space, a person from governance and then also another crypto-native and an awesome individual from the clean energy space. And so the team really started to figure out what type of Crypto tools we need, started to figure out how to really craft the use case.
It was really the launch of CryptoKitties that helped me realize kind of how to make Crypto work for carbon credits. Are you familiar with CryptoKitties?
We did an interview with Blake Finucane about crypto art, and she spoke a lot about CytoKitties.
That's awesome. CryptoKitties was created here in Vancouver, and it's an amazing story for a lot of reasons. But the part cogent for my story was how each CryptoKitty has eight attributes like eye shape and background color and fur color and so on, displayed on the kitty’s token page and coded on the blockchain. And I'm like, "This is exactly what we need to be able to have each individual carbon credit token carry all of the information of its genesis carbon offset."
A quality carbon credit is valuable and credible because of the information that backs it, all of the project information, scientific detail, auditing… Instead of eye color, we could have the name of the credit project. And instead of background color, we could have, which country was this project developed in? And what sector is it? Is it forest carbon, and so on and so forth.
So that was an "Aha" moment, because we know about Bitcoin, Ethereum and Dogecoin and the fact that people are starting to tokenize things on Ethereum. But for our project to really work, you needed to be able to know everything about that credit from that token. It was really CryptoKitties and non fungible tokens that was the first foot to fall and set us on our way.
In March 2018, I sat down and spoke with one of my collaborators, one of the five, Matt Lockyer here in Vancouver. He had just submitted ERC-998, which is an improvement or a tool proposed to the Ethereum blockchain that allows you to create “crypto composables.” This would basically allow your non fungible token, like your CryptoKitty, be able to own other non fungible tokens, like other CryptoKitties. Or you could tokenize bags of CryptoKitty cat food, and have them belong to your CryptoKitty token. Or your CryptoKitty could hold an ether token. That ability to nest other non fungible tokens within other non fungible tokens was the other foot to fall. Because of course the thing that created the huge slowdown in the Ethereum network near the end of 2017, and a lot of ruckus about CryptoKitties was that you can actually only move one of them per transaction on the blockchain. And so that wasn't going to work for our climate system where we're going to have billions of tons moving all the time. But that ability to do that composability where we could say, issue a project token that could then issue and hold 50,000 individual carbon credit tokens? Now we're talking.
So as that got clear and we moved forward, then we opened up the gates for more team members. Since then we've grown to a team of around 20 kind, generous folks, contributing from a wide variety of life experiences and professional expertise. Because you know, we have a subject matter focus on blockchain and climate, but building this into fruition takes a lot of other skillsets. We’re really lucky because these folks are all profoundly skilled, and leaders in their respective fields. It brings home the fact that we’re working on a critical task, and bringing compelling tools to the job of getting it done.
Conceptually, I understand. So there's what, 196 countries in the Paris Agreement?
Yeah.
When you say that you have people buying in to the project who are you talking about exactly? If country is the answer, how many of the 196 are currently operating on the blockchain?
Right. So that's our next frontier. It’s been neat just getting people in the space to understand and get on board with this idea. Those are kind of the precursors to the other types of buy in which we'll need ultimately to get some or all of the 196 countries on board. I think a stretch goal is to create like the tool for everybody to use the tool for Paris Agreement-compliant issuance and exchange of carbon credits . But what's more likely is that we'll have a smaller number as few as two, two's our minimum, one buyer, one seller, to trial this. And so right now we've come back from the UN COP25 in Madrid, and we're working on building a national party working group of countries to co-create, utilize and champion our system. We have a notional goal of six varied countries interested in working with us over the next year and a half to try to refine and support the building of this tool so that by this time next year we are actually able to allow countries to trade carbon credits through our system. We're hoping to get countries that are keen to use the tool and will say, if you build it and it works, we'd like to use it. We also want them as users to really provide their feedback. What do they want to see? What are they allergic to?
Why is this a blockchain manifestation of the Paris Agreement a better option than what's happening right now?
With the slight caveat that I'm still learning, and there's always a risk that I'm smack talking a little bit, which is really not the goal. But basically, Article 6 in the Paris Agreement, which is the one around international carbon trading, started out as only one page. Before work could start to build a tool like we’re building to enable really clear transparency around these international trades, countries have to do a bunch of work around hammering out the Article 6 rule book. By 2018, all the other Articles that have solidified their rules and might be like 40, 50, 100 pages. But active opposition to critical parts of a rulebook for Article 6 has meant that, even though the rules are looking a lot better now after COP25, they’re still not complete and universally agreed upon. This has a number of impacts, including that further building of a transparency tool like ours by official channels has paused until some future date.
Under the earlier Kyoto protocol, there was a system of carbon credits called the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). International trade of these credits was registered on the International Transaction Log or the ITL. Every two years the ITL recorded the sum total of all the pluses and minuses, all of the trades that each country would do of carbon credits. An interesting nuance under the CDM, was that the “developing world” could create carbon credits and sell them to the “developed world.” And that would lower the footprint of the purchasing country, usually in Europe or Japan, but they didn't actually add the corresponding emissions back onto the carbon footprint of the selling country. It was really a one way flow.
Now that all countries of the world have committed to reducing emissions, if you are going to sell a carbon credit and somebody else is going to remove it from their footprint, YOU have to put it back on your footprint as the seller. And so this International Transaction Log, my understanding is they're not going to even start building it or its replacement until Article 6 has been finalized, which will hopefully be this November in COP26 in Scotland, but we don't really know. The fact that they can't start building that till all the rules are made and the fact that we hear it will take around three years just to build that once all the rules are made, really slows down the ability to roll out to a carbon market and mobilize capital to fight climate change. Those are some of the reasons why we decided we needed to do this.
The other main reason that's kind of intangible, or emotional, or maybe I’m just being overtaken by crypto geekery, is that if the world goes with the old way, they're locking in this old technology and it’s not really sufficient for the task at hand. If we’re going to mobilize the billions of dollars of capital and deploy it in every corner of the world to fight climate change, we’re going to need the technological advancement of tools like blockchain. So really we're building our platform to enable corresponding adjustments between carbon accounts to happen in real time rather than every two years.
It’s a mis-fit. It just doesn’t feel right. Also, this use case really jives with the nature of crypto and of blockchain, which tokenizes values or tokenizes an outcome. This is exactly what was needed to solve this problem of how to issue, exchange and reconcile carbon credits under the Paris Agreement. When you have a tool that fits the task so well, it just kind of calls use it. So that's a cluster of the reasons why we are.