- It was an ordinary Friday. Courtney Brown, 24, of Kalamazoo, Mich., was busy looking for a job. "I've applied all kinds of places," she says. "Wal-Mart, Target, Verizon Wireless."
Then she got a strange letter in the mail. "'We are writing you with good news,'" she reads to me over the phone. "'We got rid of some of your Everest College debt ... no one should be forced to mortgage their future for an education.'"
The letter went on to say that her private student loan from a for-profit college, in the amount of $790.05, had just been forgiven outright by something called the Rolling Jubilee.
b_b and I were talking about something proactive that could be done here. Create an online database where people can enter their info, and who owns their debt. When a certain mass of people are added that have debt owned by the same entity, they crowdfund to buy the debt for pennies on the dollar, then retire it.
To add on to mk's thought, essentially the idea would be to set up a shell debt collection service, then crowd fund the debt by the debtors themselves. Say I owe BoA $10,000 on a credit card. I could pay this service $500-1000 to have my debt retired. That's some shit for that stupid Tech Crunch Disrupt thing. We could all help to fuck over BoA, Chase, etc (but of course not AmEx), and especially those sleazy private student loan funders who prey on low income people matriculated at for-profit schools.
Instead, what he and the group's members are trying to do is draw attention to the plight of millions of people with unpaid student loans, especially high-interest private loans from relatively expensive for-profit colleges. I like what they're doing. But I can't imagine there aren't many people who are aware of student debt. The testimonial in the story is nice though. I'm glad they're able to help remove all of some people's debt.The amount erased by Rolling Jubilee, and the number of students helped, will not make a practical dent in that sum. "It doesn't solve the problem," says Gokey.