Weekend Student Loan Roundup

Whee! The news is coming fast and furious.

Education Finance Partners will pay $2.5 million into the same fund that Citibank and Sallie Mae are anteing up for. (New York Times)

"In a fierce contest to control the student loan market, the nation’s banks and lenders have for years waged a successful campaign to limit a federal program that was intended to make borrowing less costly by having the government provide loans directly to students." (New York Times) (also see my piece from January 2006 on this topic.)

Lenders Misusing Student Database--Improper searches raise privacy fears
(Washington Post) Some lending companies with access to a national database that contains confidential information on tens of millions of student borrowers have repeatedly searched it in ways that violate federal rules, raising alarms about data mining and abuse of privacy, government and university officials said.

Overseeing this database was Matteo Fontana's job.