Education

Students with loans typically receive a barrage of solicitations for loan consolidations and other services in their mailboxes, and they often wonder how the advertisers got their names and addresses. Recent reports suggest they may have come from the U.S. Education Department itself.

Sallie Mae, the nation's largest student lender, will become a private company owned by Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and two private equity firms under a $25 billion deal announced Monday.

The buyout comes as student lenders grapple with federal funding cuts and a widening investigation into deceptive college lending practices. Last week, Sallie Mae agreed to pay $2 million and alter its lending practices as part of a settlement with New York's attorney general...

For parents who struggle like Sisyphus to overcome mountainous college expenses, only to be frustrated by the system, a bit of relief may be in sight.

No, college costs aren't coming down. Not even close-private schools are projected to raise tuition and fees about 5 1/2percent for the coming academic year, says the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities...

But while the cost of an education keeps growing at a significantly faster clip than inflation, the tools parents can use to cover these expenses are also starting to improve...

As families wade through college financial aid options this month, they will find the path to a degree is paved with perilous debt.

With rising tuition and fees, students have increasingly turned to government and private loans over the past decade, with graduates owing an average of $20,000.

The borrowing frenzy has helped fuel deceptive practices among private lenders and colleges that put students and parents at risk of making poor financial choices, say law enforcement officials and education experts.

Education Policy Program Directory Michael Dannenberg was the featured guest for CNBC's recent report on the student loan scandals, which aired as part of "The Wall Street Journal Report with Maria Bartiromo." A partial transcript and video clip are available here; for the complete piece, please visit the CNBC website.

Get rich with no risk.

The classic business pitch is usually too good to be true – unless you're talking about the student loan business. Student loans, which banks and other lenders avoided in decades past, have become a creditor's dream...

Every day at colleges across the country, financial aid administrators help students navigate the complicated maze of grants and loans they need to finance their educations.

So many took exception when New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo started a probe of the field's practices...

Cuomo's office, with separate research from the Washington-based New America Foundation, have uncovered troubling ties between student loan companies and college financial aid officers, who are supposed to give students unbiased advice on borrowing.

WASHINGTON (AP) - An Education Department official placed on leave over a potential conflict of interest in his management of the government's student loan program filed disclosure forms that raise questions about the department's oversight of its own employees.

With the scandal over conflicts of interest in student loans continuing to grow, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is pledging tougher enforcement of ethics rules, as the Education Department released more information about sale of stock in a lender by an official who works on student loan issues.

According to Student Market Measure, a marketing research firm, this was the distribution of undergraduate loan volume among different lenders at Columbia University in 2006.