It was only a matter of time before a college would have the nerve to quote its cost of attendance at nearly $100,000 a year. This spring, we’re catching our first glimpse of it.

One letter to a newly admitted Vanderbilt University engineering student showed an all-in price — room, board, personal expenses, a high-octane laptop — of $98,426. A student making three trips home to Los Angeles or London from the Nashville campus during the year could hit six figures.

If, like me, you have a college-bound high-school senior in your family, you’ve likely been on the receiving end of yet another colossal screw-up by our federal government: the overhaul of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, commonly known as the FAFSA. Every year, students (or more commonly their parents) need to fill out the FAFSA with information about their income, assets, and expenses in order to qualify for federal student aid.

The U.S. Education Department said it has discovered a calculation error in hundreds of thousands of student financial aid applications sent to colleges this month and will need to reprocess them — a blunder that follows a series of others and threatens further delays to this year’s college applications.

Millions of older Americans are at risk of losing some of their Social Security benefits after defaulting on student loans, Democratic lawmakers said in a letter urging the Biden administration to act.

Why it matters: Seniors are one of the highest risk categories with reports showing nearly 40% of borrowers aged 65 or older in default. Federal programs that claw those funds back mean seniors lose as much as $2,500 in Social Security benefits annually.

The Biden administration announced Friday morning that it is expanding and accelerating its income-driven student loan forgiveness plan.

Borrowers who originally took out loans of $12,000 or less and have made at least 10 years of payments will be eligible for debt cancellation as early as next month under the Saving on a Valuable Education Plan.

The average private student loan interest rates spiked for borrowers with credit scores of 720 or higher who used the Credible marketplace to take out 10-year fixed-rate loans and 5-year variable-rate loans the week of June 12, 2023. 

10-year fixed rate: 7.39%, up from 7.16% the week before, +0.23

5-year variable rate: 12.73%, up from 6.95% the week before, +5.78

President Joe Biden’s new plan to forgive student debt is likely to look much different than his first.

After the Supreme Court ultimately blocked Biden’s policy that would have cancelled up to $20,000 in student debt for tens of millions of people in June, the president immediately announced that he would attempt to deliver the relief another way.

The Education Department approved millions of applications for President Biden’s now-defunct student loan forgiveness program without checking to make sure the borrowers were eligible, Congress’ chief watchdog said in a new report.

Two years after fraudsters stole hundreds of billions of dollars from pandemic assistance programs based on self-reporting of eligibility, the Biden administration seemed poised to make the same mistake, the Government Accountability Office concluded.

Colleges nationwide have received a wave of complaints that they have misled applicants financially as the Biden administration fights to expand regulations for federal student loan forgiveness.

The Education Department said Tuesday that it would fine the nation’s largest Christian university a record $37.7 million and encourage more than 7,500 former students to file federal borrower defense to repayment, or BDR, claims to cancel their loan debts.

The U.S. Department of Education will penalize student loan servicer Mohela, or the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority, for its failure to send timely billing statements to 2.5 million borrowers.

As a result of Mohela’s errors, more than 800,000 borrowers were delinquent on their loans, the Education Department said in a statement Monday.

The department is withholding $7.2 million in payment to Mohela for October, and has directed the servicer to place all affected borrowers in forbearance until the issue is fully resolved, it said.