CRL in the News

"It's a comprehensive package that seeks to make college more affordable, more accessible, and hold institutions more accountable for the results that they achieve,” explains Ashley Harrington, a special assistant to the president of the Center for Responsible Lending. “And so we think that it's a big, strong step in the right direction."

Today, the Center for Responsible Lending released a new report examining the repayment experiences of borrowers of longer-term payday loans in Colorado. The report is based on focus groups that were conducted in four Colorado cities in September 2017. The full report is worth the read, but here are the key takeaways...

The American Association of State Colleges and Universities, the Center for Responsible Lending and Young Invincibles (which advocates for economic opportunity for young adults) all say this bill provides a practical solution to the student debt crisis and would increase access to college for low-income students.

“Mulvaney’s decision to halt the CFPB from moving forward on addressing abusive overdraft fee practices will severely impact poor families and communities of color,” said Rebecca Borne, Senior Policy Counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending in response.

"It puts so much responsibility on students and students alone," said Ashley Harrington, a lawyer at the Center for Responsible Lending, "and on no other piece of this puzzle."

The Black unemployment rate is almost double the 3.5 percent unemployment rate for whites and 4.6 percent for Hispanics. About eight percent of African-American homeowners lost their properties to foreclosure from 2007 to 2009, according to estimates from the Center for Responsible Lending. Also, only 43 percent of Black people owned homes in 2017, according to an annual report from...

These loans tend to carry much higher APRs than bank or credit union loans, according to the nonprofit Center for Responsible Lending. They also generally come with high upfront fees and require borrowers to put down what the center calls "a disproportionate percentage of the car's actual value."

Ashley Harrington, a policy counsel with the Center for Responsible Lending, served as a member of the negotiated rulemaking committee and said in a statement that the proposed rule "reads more like a roadmap for institutions seeking to abuse students and avoid accountability and transparency rather than a plan to protect students and taxpayers." "Under this rule, [ED] goes further...

“For too long, for-profit colleges have failed to serve the educational purpose for which they were intended,” Harrington said. “The combination of high costs and low graduation rates by these bad actors have resulted in unfair burdens for student borrowers and taxpayers. This bill improves accountability for all higher education institutions and creates a sensible path to fix our broken...

“If it wasn’t clear before, it certainly is now,” observed Whitney Barkley-Denney, a Senior Policy Counsel with the Center for Responsible Lending. “The Department of Education and Secretary DeVos are more interested in shielding corporate actors like Navient and for-profit colleges from taking responsibility for their bad acts,” added Barkley-Denney. “Like the Attorneys General speaking out against this latest development...