Student Loans and DOE S.W.A.T. Teams | Hacker News Reader

Student Loans and DOE S.W.A.T. Teams

wendymcelroy.com

48 pointsbillswift34 comments

Every federal department has an Inspector General and the employees are federal agents authorized to carry firearms and conduct raids. However contrary to the article, the OIG agents, like all other officers, have to get a judge to sign the warrant and approve it for no-knock service.

A few examples: NASA OIG: http://oig.nasa.gov/ USPS Postal Inspectors: https://postalinspectors.uspis.gov/ National Endowment for the Arts: http://www.nea.gov/about/OIG/Contents.html

All Inspectors General: http://www.ignet.gov/igs/homepage1.html

The author's misuse of the acronym DOE is rather distracting -- DOE typically refers to the Department of Energy here in the US. The Department of Education (or Education Department) typically uses "ED".

Thanks. I was wondering how many US gov departments were using the same initial.

>The most likely crime being investigated is student aid fraud, which is an immense problem especially at inner-city colleges. Because of the ease of obtaining government grants and loans, students can register for different programs under multiple names and Social Security numbers.

Worth noting: this stuff happens mostly w/ public institutions, since the private ones are under harsher guidelines and a lot more scrutiny.

What harsher guidelines? Do you have a citation for this?

I would think the much greater number of students who attend public schools would also correlate to greater instances of fraud. There is no mention of any relation as a percentage.

I learned the above by speaking with employees at a private for-profit school, but when I went looking for supporting evidence I found I've been somewhat misinformed. The private school loan default rates are much worse than public schools:

http://www.quickanded.com/2010/09/repayment-rates-vs-cdrs.ht...

"...unlike a house, an education cannot be repossessed."

Electroshock therapy until the loans are repaid in full? On a more serious note, I had no idea that the DoE has paramilitary forces busting down doors. Why is a polite knock not sufficient? Does it not instill enough fear into other students who are or may default on their loans?

Presumably so students will have no advance warning to flush their diplomas down the toilet.

Can anybody confirm that the DOE really sent a SWAT-like team just to collect on a debt? If this is confirmed, this should be very alarming to us.

sent a SWAT-like team

If by 'SWAT-like' you mean cops with guns, body armor, breaking down a door at first light, yes.

to collect on a debt?

Investigating fraud.

This is not a new thing - the police have been doing things like this for years now.

Fast entry makes sense if you have dangerous men, ready to shoot it out. But for white collar crime, when the suspects are known to be meek as lambs ... not so much.

If there is computer data, all it takes is a couple seconds for an industrious suspect to begin destroying evidence. MP5s or M4s would be totally unnecessary, but fast entry and pulling the power cords ASAP might be reasonable.

I'd have to be a judge and see their request for a warrant...

Most people are not hackers. If they've got evidence of wrong doing on their hard drive it's likely kept in Excel. Wipedisk - whazzat? I send my file to Recycle and it's gone, right?

If you think your suspect is going to execute a 'wipe disk' operation, then don't knock down their damn door, catch them when they're out and about and away from their computer.

DoE OIG released a statement saying that they were investigating a criminal fraud case, not unpaid student loans.

Sigh. I'm tired of the internet, and its nonstop flow of stories which sound outrageous when you read the summary but rapidly sound a bit more sensible when you find out the details.

I'm not sure if sending S.W.A.T.-like team to "investigate" is sensible.

The U.S. managed to investigate things by sending detectives for a long time. Other countries seem to manage the policing without the need for equivalent of S.W.A.T.

S.W.A.T. teams are equivalent of Special Forces in Army. They are armed with extremely dangerous weapons and highly trained to kill. You're only supposed to send those people when there's a reasonable suspicions of armed resistance, not on routine investigation of white-collar crime, just because you can.

I've seen quite a bit of debate over whether the media is mischaracterizing what happened with the whole "SWAT-like teams" bit. Local law enforcement has said they didn't deploy any SWAT units, and, so far as I've been able to find, while the DoE OIG does own some shotguns[1], they don't have any real tactical teams.

Given the way the rest of this has been reported, it's kind of my suspicion that a bunch of investigators in "POLICE" raid jackets and a few shotguns got turned into a "SWAT team" by reporters.

[1] http://usgovinfo.about.com/b/2010/03/18/why-the-dept-of-educ...

Maybe it isn't sensible. But it's more sensible.

Are there other details which still haven't been revealed? Was the dude a well-known organized crime figure? Was his home bristling with weapons? Had they already tried the sensible "knock on the door" method? I don't know. But I've been bitten enough times by important details left out of the story to make it more sensational that I'm disinclined to get too outraged over things I've read on the internet until I've heard both sides of the story.

Still, I would be worried simply because they could get a warrant without going to the court, and them having their own law enforcement forces... Isn't the police enough?

Our government also invaded Iraq to search for weapons and Afghanistan to search for Bin Laden.

In my opinion if they were investigating fraud then the raid was reasonable. The no knock warrant seems like a bit of a stretch though. What were they going to do? Flush the money down the toilet?

If it was just over defaulted loans, then hopefully the DOE put liens and levys where they could prior.

Why would they give the money directly to the student instead of the educational institution?

Apparently to give to those who need it more. For example, because my parents had a median Silicon-valley income (which was above the national median), I did not get any financial aid, reasonable financing options, etc. My parents, limited by the mortgage payments to the house they bought in 2007 (bad timing, I know), had very little free cash (I had a little sister). As a result, I had to work for my money while there were supposedly poor classmates running around with Macbook Pros and brand new iPhones and iPads, paid for by their financial aid. (Or rather, they didn't have to pay for living and tuition, so every dollar they earned went into accessories).

You can tell I'm a bit bitter about this. I wonder what everyone else thinks. I understand that education should be equal opportunity, but this is not equal opportunity.

Except those people are all buried in debt from student loans and their extravagant spending.

You kind of dodged a bullet there.

Which kind of people? Those receiving financial aid, or those who aren't (like me)?

Those who took out loans and spent them on macbooks.

Would you consider a computer science student with a Macbook Pro wasteful/overprivileged?

I wouldn't expect film students to work with recycled 5-year-old Walmart cameraphones; I'm not offended by art students with DSLRs, nor people in English classes (who could technically handwrite drafts and go to a lab to type the final copy) with laptops.

If we expected everyone to work with the cheapest tools possible, I suspect the quality of the output would decline.

I was a computer science student (thankfully), so finding a job wasn't a terribly difficult task. However, I do think a CS student with a MBP is overprivileged. Throughout college I had a single laptop that cost $800 (which I paid for myself). I wrote and graded/proctored exams and problem sets, worked as a web developer for my school, organized presentations for a professor, in addition to doing internships over summers. After paying for rent, food and tuition (which unfortunately rose somewhere around 50% during my stay at Berkeley...), I feel that I deserve something better than a $800 machine, especially since I studied CS.

I can't possibly say the same about someone who did not work for everything else. If you got financial aid, that's for tuition, not for extra playthings. Use that money on tuition, books, and a basic machine, not a top-of-the-line MBP.

I apologize if I sound overly harsh of my peers who got off easy. I understand that some parents who are well-off enough to pay for their children's education should help out a bit, but I think it's unfair to punish a student because of his parents' circumstances.

I hope you can understand.

I'm in the same exact boat as you. Between my three parents, Mom, Dad & Step-Dad. They make over 200K+ and I get crap for student loans from the government. My father helped me get my AAS but I am now working on a BS and I receive no help from my mom or step dad as they believe this is my complete sole responsibility... It's definitely tough out here.

I agree it's tough, but it's not that my parents refuse to pay... I just don't think they can afford to pay, given the amount of stress they have from paying their mortgage. There's such a crude measure of "ability to pay" that it doesn't take into account the different circumstances; that a family sitting on a load of debt (1+m), making 150k (together) in the Silicon Valley on an underwater property, is not more well off than a family with no debt, a paid-for property, making 70k a year (with only the dad working), living in Florida.

Did you consider emancipating yourself from your parents?

You still need to pay rent and eat. Pretty integral parts of any good education, I'd wager.

I'm usually suspicious of state-phobia/"no big government" themes because there's usually a host of prejudices and nasty fallback concepts undergirding things, but as a person struggling with student loan debt (I know, I know, unlike everyone else on the site amirite) this hits home in a big way.

But as far as policy debate goes, the university system is a trainwreck of financial demand and is only going to get worse. Maybe Peter we need to do other things than college, but that isn't very responsive to historically sedimented structural inequities (I know, I know, meritocracy is best, etc). A discussion of free schools is underway in Britain, but I feel that presents a chicken-or-the-egg problem.

What do we do?

Its not a train wreck, is just mired in a bit of Federal-State quirk-ness of the US system at least the public ones.

The original basis for not funding EDu in the US was due to a clash between the class of the US congress versus returning long haired Vietnam viets and thus they choose the loan route.

We need in the US to end the debate between Fed and State control over the area of college education..if states want control and cannot provide full funding than Fed should not be forced to do so..that thinking got the US with help of banking lobbyists into making exceptions to the Uniform Commercial Code, bankruptcy laws, etc to punish the ones in the middle(the students).

If Fed and state govs do not get their act together...it will be student revolt through non-payment.

The article makes a decent (if rather convoluted) point. However, the advertisements and "buy our clothing" section really push it over the edge for me. (in case you haven't seen the site, I'm referring to the content of what is listed above, not the fact there are ads)

Not only was it distracting, I can no longer take this article seriously.

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