Debt and Derferment Difficulties
My loan debt currently stands at about $70,000 after borrowing about $65,000 to pay for my undergraduate and Master’s degree. My 2 loan companies are National Education Servicing and Great Lakes, and almost all my loans have an interest rate of 6.8%.
However, my horror story has to do with the way the loan companies treated me during my attempt to get my loans deferred this past summer. At the end of May 2011 I had finished my coursework for my PhD program, and was about to begin my dissertation. Even though I was still in a graduate program, my loan companies started requiring me to pay my loans as I was now not technically a “graduate student” but a “graduate fellow”, a designation that requires a separate form to be filled out.
Over the course of 5 months I sent my loan companies about 4 deferment request forms that were each denied for arbitrary and capricious reasons. The first was denied because I sent in the wrong form after the loan company gave me bad information. The second was denied because the dates were incorrect. The third was denied because the dates conflicted with the second (in other words, they rejected a correctly filled out form). And the fourth was denied because an administrator used the words “graduate student” instead of “graduate fellow” (a distinction my school doesn’t even recognize).
As a result of these ridiculous requirements, my loans went into delinquency and I was threatened with a bad credit rating as a result. It ultimately took 6 months to get my loans deferred even though a simple phone call from the loan companies to my school (and, if needed, a fax from my school to the companies) could have confirmed that I was still enrolled there in 5 minutes.
