Desperately needed. We were happy to do that. I think the record the record will stay open for 14 days for questions and comments. I want to thank the full panel here, especially mayor nevarre, via teleconference. Youre here, which is good. We appreciate that. Especially because youre dealing with a real live issue on the ground. We thank the panel here and thank you for your written testimony, theres a lot of suggestions that you placed in there that will examine. This committee that deals with emergency disaster first responders, fema and others, this is an important issue and i have a feeling as you described very well, mr. Hubbard, that the summer is just beginning and were already seeing a lot of issues. Thank you all very much. The meeting is adjourned and record will be open for 14 days. Thank you. On the next washington journal well focus on president obamas threecountry, fourday trip to europe. Our guest is stephen szabo. And well mark the 70th anniversary of dday from the world war ii memorial on the national mall. Washington journal is live on cspan every day at 7 00 a. M. Eastern. And you can join the conversation on facebook and twitter. Russia as United States is a nation that believes in its mission and we believe in freedom we believe in distributing our core values which suddenly disappeared in 2000s. But it didnt go anywhere because at our core it was still there. The biggest for all those years was the victory there. That is our Main National holiday. And that unites the whole nation. And how it was presented to the nation by president putin is that in ukraine those are western sponsestered fascists that came to power and flex of former Ukrainian Army during world war ii and, so, he used this to prove that these are fascists who are fighting against both russian and ukrainian nation. So, its misinterpretation that we are looking just to protect russians or russians speaking, no, for the overwhelming majority of russians, we are continuing world war ii. And we are liberating, really liberating ukraine from the fascist threat. This weekend on cspan, a look into the politics of putins russia saturday morning at 10 00 eastern. On cspan2 book tv, live twoday coverage of the Chicago Tribune printer fest starting saturday at 11 00 a. M. Eastern. Cspan3 American History and beginning saturday morning at 10 30 eastern. Senator sharon bill introduced a bill to allow individuals without standing Student Loans to refinance at lower Interest Rates. Chaired a hearing wednesday that looked at Student Loan Debt. Its an hour. Subcommittee come to order. Thank you for joining us. Ohio and other panel, thank you for coming back and being of assistance to us in a number. About a decade ago we began to see the warning signs. A few years later we watched the combination of wall street greed and attentive regulators helping to destroy our economy. Were still picking up the pieces. The crisis, the topic of todays hearing. Student Loan Servicing are very much interconnected. For the course of the last few years we have seen homeowners become victims of improper foreclosure when their mortgage servicer could have introduced them to enroll in a Loan Modification Program but chose not to. Hear we are, again, outstanding student debt is 1. 2 million and student loan is second to mortgage debt as we all have heard. In may 2013, the Consumer FinancialProtection Bureau described heavy student loan burdens and a growing group of Business Leaders and regulators have joined to describe how Student Loans can interrupt the slowly recovering economy. Excessive student debt can defer or destroy the dreams of perspective firsttime home buyers, Small Business entrepreneurship and limit the options of young graduates that might work as teachers and doctors in underserved areas. Defaults will have longterm impacts on recovery. Its critical that we ensure that student loan servers do their jobs properly to protect individual borrowers and our economy as a whole. Last year i wrote a letter to some of the largest banks and Student Loan Companies asking about their efforts to modify loans for borrowers in trouble, measuring their success and enrollingoe enrolling borrowers in affordable plans. No bank is enrolled more than 5 of borrowers who are in trouble. Im concerned that student loan servers care more about maximizing profits than giving proper customer service. One of the questions to consider, the repayment system set up to make borrowers fail. Are servicers making sure that borrowers under the full range experiencing Financial Hardship and many loan rePayment Options are better suited for contract lawyers than recent graduates. If we dont give graduates the tools to succeed, we cant expect them it have a fair shot at building a successful livelihood. How can borrowers understand the rePayment Options best suited to their specific needs when written in legallies that only lawyers are trained to understand. Thats clearly unrealistic at best. In the doddfrank act i proposed within the cfpb and, again, shoutout to senator warren for her terrific work at the beginning and since on that bureau. That office has issued reports describing pervasive and troubling practices, servers allocating payments to maximize late fees and activating their military benefits on their Student Loans and all be orrowe enrolling in Loan Modifications programs. Based on referrals from this office and the department of justice the fdic found the nations largest servicerer broken a series of laws. Its been ordered to pay fines and compensation to more than 90 million. In february another major player in the private student loan market revealed it, too, was under investigation by cfpb for its student loan practices services. Recommends that Congress Examine some of the reforms to the credit card and Mortgage Servicing markets such as ones related to Payment Processing and servicing transfers in order to improve the student Loan Servicing profit. Harm borrowers in our economy and borrower bill of rights which provides protections and rePayment Options for private loan borrowers who are at risk for default. Required lenders to notify borrowers and would protect borrowers from penalties due to errors on the part of the servicerer. Students loan have significantly higher Interest Rates, limited Payment Options and no relief for the many graduates who dont make the amount of money that they expected or who have been laid off or even unable to find work. My refinancing education addresses this problem by authoring treasury to make the student loan payment more efficient. Allow borrowers and more affordable loans at no cost to taxpayers. I look forward to our witnesses views on servicing practices and the opportunities to ensure accountability and better Quality Customer service. Senator warren, you want to make a statement . Okay, thank you. Let me introduce the four witnesses. We have votes at 11 00 and go as much past 11 00 as we can, but, obviously, well ask people to stay within their time limits, if they can. Nancy hoover financial director at denison. Past chair of the National Direct student loan coalition a Grassroots Organization that works to improve the federal direct loan program. 30 years working in Financial Office and helping students afford secondary education. William hubbard Vice President of student veterans and he joined the marine corps at 17, currently is a drilling reservist out of joint base bowling. Welcome, mr. Hubbard. Mr. Robert geremia teaches ap u. S. History in District Of Columbia history. He has some students here with him today. Thank you for that. He served as a student mentor grade level leader, track coach, corepresentative and remember the American Federation of teachers and washington teachers union. Lindsay burke fellow education policy at the heritage foundation. Done Extensive Research on the governments role on education. Welcome, ms. Burke. Ms. Hoover, if youll begin. Members of the subcommittee, thank you for inviting me to testify today at the hearing regarding the borrowers experience with Student Loans. My name is nancy hoover and i am the director of Financial Aid at Denison University in grandville, ohio. A selective, independent, undergraduate liberal arts college with an enrollment of approximately 2,200 students. I have been the director of Financial Aid at denison since 1994 and the direct loan program in year two of the program. Denisons endowment allows us to Financial Aid from ourversity fund to 97 of our student body. An average of 47 of our graduates borrow federal loans and 4 borrow private loans. The cumulative federal indebt indebtedness for the denison 2014 class was a little over 21,000. The federal direct loan Program Turns 20 years old this year. The direct loan delivery process for loan funds to students has continued to be efficient, reliable and easy for schools to administer. Even after the 100 transition of all schools to the dl program. When the direct loan program was first implemented, all of the loans were serviced by a single contractor. All correspondents to borrowers was identified as the william d. Federal direct loan program and the logo for the department of education made the servicing contractor for these loans invisible to the students. The department had to expand the number of services to accommodate the increased volume of Loan Servicing required for the purchase of federally backed loans in 2008 and the transition of all schools to the federal direct lending program. The department issued new deal servicing contractors, contracts to agencies who had experienced servicing Student Loans and the ffel program and allowed, but did not require these new servers to cobrand their correspondents with the Department Logo. Since the servicers logo appears larger than the Department Logo borrowers are confused why ether receiving written or electronic correspondents from an unknown agency. Services report a large percentage of unopened emails from the borrowers because they believe the correspondence is junk mail or spam. The inherent flaw with the multiservicer is buyers do not understand who is servicing their loans and a greater risk of defaulting. Currently, there are 15 contractors servicing federally held loans. The current federal Loan Servicing environment needs to be simplified by a mandate that contractors be invisible agents of the federal government with identical processes and policies and the number of contractors be limited. Congress made progress in this area with a bipartisan budget act of 2013, which eliminates the special treatment for nonprofit student loan servicers. When the department of education has the opportunity to renew the servicer contracts, it should consult with all of the stakeholders in student Loan Servicing and open the contract bidding process to other entities in financial sectors outside the previous ffel environment. Borrowers need their point of contact for all repayment activities to be a single web portal and one phone number for account access. The department of education has made significant process towards creating a single portal for students who borrow federal loans with the creation of stude studentloans. Gov a robust portal which students can execute every required process for their federal loans, except to initiate the repayment process. Stude stude studentloan studentloans. Gov so students can repay instead of going to a specific servicer website. Senator brown, id like to thank you and other members of the committee for your support of bank on students emergency Loan Refinancing act and the student loan borrower bill of rights. Assists borrowers with loans at multiple services to refinance all of their loans to have a single servicer and also required servicers to notify of incomebased options. Repayments from which the borrower can choose, extremely confusing for students to understand the intricacies of all the rePayment Options. Congress to reduce the number of loan repayment plans to two. Standard and income based from which students can choose. Repayments should be collected through the payroll withholding. Many borrowers are unaware that the servicer has changed until they encounter a problem. According to the report by Protection Bureau, many borrowers have filed complaints to correct errors related to the servicing contracts. They need to provide notices to a change in their service like the mortgage servicers are required to do. Thank you, chairman brown, to provide administrative perspective on Student Loan Services and im happy to respond any questions you or members of the subcommittee may have. Thank you, mr. Hubbard. Chairman brown and members of the subcommittee, thank you for inviting student veterans of america to submit our testimony on student Loan Servicing, the borrowers experience. As the premier advocate for student veterans and Higher Education, it is our privilege to share this on the ground perspective with you today. As veterans graduate across the country, we believe that the student debt burden will utimately be one of the largest inhibiting factors to their longterm success. This stems from the lack of access to individual and institutional levels. They cite the following challenges. Difficulty obtaining Accurate Information about loans, convoluted pathways to gathering information and implementing programs and unnecessary road blocks put in place by servicers. Despited despite avid efforts Getting Service members and veterans the right information about the protections at the right time remains a challenge. Service members and veterans have access to protections under the Service Member civil relief act, access to many different student loan actions. This does not function cohesively and programs often function independent of each other. We have seen that many Service Members enter the military with preservice Student Loan Debt. This existing debt is also a major source of the overall debt owned by Service Members and veterans. Existing debt is particularly harmful to a Service Member or veteran when servicers do not comply with protections afforded. There is also a common misconception that veterans that go to school on a gi bill has a free ticket. We know this is simply not true. As an earned benefit not only is the gi bill not free but may not always cover the cost of a full education. This is especially true for those attending private institutions or for those considered out of state residen residents. To prevent situations that may violate a Service Member or veterans rights, we believe that institutions need to have access to a full range of financial data. This data is necessary for institutions to be able to effectively counsel their students about futures. Individuals should also have access to this data to achieve the highest level of consumer awareness. Currently, there is no widely used system that would allow any individual with education debt to see all of their loans in a centralized place. Meteor, run by the National Student clearing house, could be such a tool. The meteor program has the unique function of providing all private lender data and would simply require the approval from the department of education to access direct loan data. To date, this has yet to happen. While we might not know the full effect of student debt for this generation of veterans, we are beginning to see the first and second order effects today. Service members and veterans with student debt are significantly less likely to build their own business, save for a home or save for their retirement. The effect ovthese issues will impact the economy for years to come and will continue to distort economic behavior, if not taken seriously. In light of the issues weve identified, sva has recommended various solutions. Of the solutions we submitted to the record, we would like to highlight one in particular. Program coordination. Many programs exist to support the repayment of Student Loans, though very few of their programs have coordinated inner program relationships. A major opportunity exists, if current programs were coordinated and streamlined to function seamlessly. Putting these pieces of this puzzle to