My Thieving Student Loan Company � The Quick and the Ed

My Thieving Student Loan Company � The Quick and the Ed

My Thieving Student Loan Company

by Kevin Carey

A couple of weeks ago the mailman dropped a thin envelope with a St. Paul, Minnesota return address through the slot in my front door. It contained a check from my wife’s student lender, Northstar T.H.E. Loans, in the amount of $27.30. In that my extensive personal experience with student loan companies has very consistently been one in which the checks flow in the opposite direction, this made me curious. The check was accompanied by nothing in the way of explanation, other than a single line directing me to a website, www.northstarloansettlement.com.
It turns out that Northstar was returning money it had stolen from us a couple of years ago. When we were choosing a lender all the way back in 2001, Northstar made a big deal out of it’s “Bonus Program” whereby we would pay a lower interest rate if we made our monthly loan payments on time. This seemed like a good deal, so we picked Northstar, and proceeded to make all of our loan payments on time.
Then, in 2008, Northstar decided to suspend the “Bonus Program” on the grounds that it would rather keep the bonus money for itself. It announced this via a confusingly written letter which strongly implied that, while