A 21-year-old who's refusing to pay back her student loans compares her cause to Rosa Parks' fight

[NaturalHigh]

Mallory Heiney, a 21-year-old former student of the now-defunct Everest College, is part of a group of students refusing to pay back their student loans.

Heiney wrote an op-ed article in The Washington Post in which she described the lies Everest allegedly told her as well as the insufficient education she says she received.

Heiney and 15 other students who attended the Corinthian College system have banded together to fight what they describe as predatory student-loan tactics by the financial aid offices and a failure to provide quality education.

"In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus," Heiney wrote in her article. "This soon led to the revolutionary Montgomery bus boycott. If those who came before us can take a stand in the face of persecution, harassment, beatings, imprisonment and even death, I will certainly stand in the face of wage garnishment and a tarnished credit report."


http://www.businessinsider.com/mallory-heiney-writes-in-the-washington-post-she-isnt-paying-back-her-student-debt-2015-3

[Romeo.lima333]

1. she's gonna end up owing thousands in fines and penalties that will haunt her the rest of her life

[ck4829]

2. The price for standing up to corruption

[Orrex]

5. And they're simply going to yank it out of her paycheck anyway.

Along with any tax refunds she might otherwise be due.


Student loans are a vile curse and are not materially distinguishable from indentured servitude, but her chosen form of protest will hurt no one but herself.

[alarimer]

3. They're defunct; the students shouldn't have to pay.

Education at for-profit colleges is worthless. They ARE predatory and no better than payday loan places. They prey on the poor, they steal federal student aid money and provide nothing in return. When they go out of business, students are screwed.

[Myrina]

7. EVen IF they don't go out of business, students are still screwed.

There's no way "graduates" can ever get a job with that worthless POS "degree" that will earn them a high enough salary to pay back all those loans.

And it especially frosts my ass that they're targeting veterans now, to get VA bill / student financing money.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

4. College costs are predatory but Rosa Parks never took out a melanin loan.

I'm sympathetic to her cause on a number of points but her choice of analogy is face palm-worthy.

[NCTraveler]

6. Read the article and the quoted paragraphs.

I think the headline is completely false. I don't think she compared her cause to Rosa Parks in any way. I think she actually gave respect to Ms. Parks. She is saying if the people before her were willing to stand in the face of persecution, harassment, beatings, imprisonment and even death, she can take her stand for the betterment of society. She is saying that this fight of hers doesn't compare to the struggles of those who came before her and that is why she should be able to have the strength to fight.

The causes themselves were not compared as the title of the article states.

[Romeo.lima333]

9. she's not taking a stand on a larger than herself social issue -

she's trying to get out of her student loans and is just using this as a vehicle

[NCTraveler]

10. I don't disagree with you on that.

I don't know enough about it to determine if she is doing this for more selfish reasons or for the betterment of society. That in itself is a moot point with respect to the articles headline. Read the quote they are using to back up the headline. In no way did she compare her struggle to that of Ms. Parks as if they were equitable struggles. The quote state just the opposite. It just didn't happen when reading the quote they used to back up the headline itself.

[brooklynite]

8. This is a weak argument...

Presumably, nobody forced her to go to College. Certainly nobody required her to go to a for-profit College, much less Everest. And nobody forced her to take out a student loan to pay for it.

Government administrators should definitely crack down on diploma mills, and as a nation we should have a policy of more affordable education loans. But I don't think she can argue that because she made bad decisions, she shouldn't be responsible for making them.

[ck4829]

11. And that was Corinthian College Inc.'s strategy, *nobody* was there for the students

Corinthian Colleges is under investigation by several states attorneys general for deceptive advertising and other fraudulent acts. California Attorney General Kamala Harris has filed a complaint alleging that CCI has engaged in a predatory marketing campaign targeting job seekers and single parents with incomes near the federal poverty level. The Department of Justice obtained internal company documents in which CCI employees describe the company's target demographic as "isolated," "impatient," individuals with "low self-esteem," who have "few people in their lives who care about them" and who are "unable to see and plan well for future." The complaint alleges that CCI's has used aggressive internet and telemarketing campaigns, as well as television ads on daytime shows like Jerry Springer and Maury Povich to reach to these individuals.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everest_College

There needs to be individual responsibility, but it has very little meaning without social responsibility from institutions and the community.

[daredtowork]

17. I'm just going to point to brooklynite's comment above so others will note it. nt

[Downwinder]

12. Why are we protecting the Banks?

If they make a bad loan they should eat it. They have access to everybody's information, they can evaluate the risk. A little due diligence would have shown that Corinthian College was a ripoff.

[aikoaiko]

13. More evidence of short-sighted, poor decision-making on Ms. Heiney's part.

[GReedDiamond]

14. I was victimized by a technical school which also...

...went out of business, while the owner/operator of the "school" took hundreds of thousands of dollars in govt funded grants and loans back to his home in India.

While the school was "operating," the quality of "education" received was absolute shit - broken equipment (it was an audio/video recording engineering program, so broken equipment was a real problem), instructors were not being paid and would quit suddenly, so we'd show up for class, and there'd be no instructor present - so, completely dysfunctional and useless as a school.

I refused to pay back the loan for over 16 years, so the amount I owed quadrupled. Year after year, tax refunds were taken from me, and they finally attempted to garnish my wages.

I finally found a bureaucrat at the Federal level who found the loophole which released me from the loan.

I was also refunded thousands of dollars of stolen tax refunds.

So, it is possible to fight back when there is clear cut corruption on the part of the school, even if it may take a decade or two.

Good luck to the students in the story of the OP. When people sign up for these schools, they should get what they are paying for, or be released from the debt.

[NaturalHigh]

15. Good for you. Most people wouldn't have had the perserverance to fight them that long.

I'm glad you got your money back from the stolen tax refunds. It's just too bad the operator of the school fled and wasn't charged with fraud.

[GReedDiamond]

16. Yeah, the school owner/operator was a citizen of India...

...and, while I was attending the school, he made repeated trips to India, where it was alleged he was transporting the stolen loot from the student loans and grants.

He had operated the school for 13 years before I signed up at the beginning of the school's 14th year.

For the first 13 years, the school was not in the student loans/grants programs offered through the Fed Govt. Once the money tap was turned on, the first thing done was to double the tuition costs from previous years of private operation.

I knew nothing about this stuff, I just fell for the song and dance I got from the financial aid officer about how great the school was, with a 13 year history of success. I was out of work and getting desperate, so I took the bait.

Fortunately for me, the one thing I had going was, I had my own little recording studio, which I had been running for years with my different band projects. So, I was able to do the assignments in my own studio, which saved me from the school's broken equipment. I let a couple of my fellow students use my studio, too. It occurred to me how ridiculous it was for me to be attending this joke school, so I took a leave of absence until the school sorted out its various problems. Instead, it closed.

After the school closure, the officials from the California Student Aid Commission acknowledged the problems with the school including the criminality of the owner. But they simply said to me, "but you should still pay back your loans," because they "could not guarantee the quality of education received."

They refused to put the blame on the owner, where the blame clearly belonged, but instead preferred to harass me while attempting to ruin me financially, along with others unfortunate enough to have attended this scam school.

I finally went to the Federal level for help, and got it.