GBH News: A State Agency That Issues Student Loans Has Sued Thousands of Borrowers
Excerpt from Politico and GBH News | By: Jenifer McKim | December 16, 2024 | Photo: Jenifer McKim
The Justice Media co-Lab is an interdisciplinary collaboration among CDS, BU Spark!, the College of Communication’s Journalism Department, and the BU Hub Cross-College Challenge.
Laquaysia Anderson-Jenkins walked into the Boston Municipal Court in Roxbury on a recent fall day because a state agency was suing her over a $12,000 student loan.
She didn’t question the amount she owed. She’d fallen behind in payments after graduation in 2017, she says, challenged by gaps in work and other financial responsibilities.
Anderson-Jenkins just wanted to make things right, especially because her mother had co-signed the loan from the Massachusetts Educational Financing Authority. But even as she stood outside the courtroom, the 31-year-old mental health practitioner from Dedham said she wished she’d known before what she knows now: private loans offered by the state leave little room for mistakes.
“Their (payment) amounts are high. And if you miss one, they’re on attack mode,” the UMass Dartmouth graduate said. “You really want to get your degree and you feel like this is the only option, so you do it. And then after, you wish that you could have done more research to find grants and scholarships and things.”
Anderson-Jenkins is not the only one facing student debt regrets. The Massachusetts Educational Financing Authority has filed more than 3,300 lawsuits against borrowers in Massachusetts civil courts since 2015, and more than 1,300 of those in the past three years, according to data obtained by the GBH News Center for Investigative Reporting and analyzed by students from Boston University’s Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences’ SPARK! Program.
Data analysis was provided by students from Boston University’s Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences’ SPARK! Program. Students Benjamin Coleman, Caslow Chien, Kenji Wagner, Hitaishi Hitaishi and Evan Park contributed to this report; the team was led by students Kevin Wu and Jessica Tong.