A former U.S. Education Department researcher whose investigation into improper student-loan subsidies was squelched by his superiors now says his research into private lending was dismissed by the department.
Jon H. Oberg, who wrote a memo in 2003 warning that some lenders were overcharging the government for subsidies on certain loans — three years before the department moved to end the overpayments — says he drafted a paper that same year that raised questions about private lending to low-income students. In both cases, he says, he was brushed off and told to work on other things.
“I gave two wake-up calls to the department in 2003 and in return was given the back of the hand,” he wrote in an e-mail message.
Mr. Oberg, who is now retired, said he had hoped his paper would be peer reviewed and published by the department. Instead, he said, he was told to add a disclaimer to the cover page noting that the report did “not necessarily reflect the position of the U.S. Department of Education.”
A few months later, he was told to end his research into excess subsidies and focus his attention on his primary job of monitoring grants and contracts.
A spokesman for the department’s Institute of Education Sciences said officials there did not recall the private-lending paper, but added that if Mr. Oberg had requested peer review, “it is certain that he would have been turned down.”
“The Institute of Education Sciences does not have an intramural research program,” said Mike Bowler, director of outreach and communications. “It carries out its work through grants and contracts to individuals and organizations. Staff in IES’s research center monitor those grants and contracts.”
Mr. Oberg says the institute has the authority to publish research of its own but has chosen not to. He points to a section of statute that authorizes the institute to prepare and publish research “conducted by” as well as “supported through” the agency.
“I felt that these were potentially important findings that should be shared with other academic researchers, but the department did not want to do that,” he said.
Recently, Mr. Oberg’s paper has caught the attention of Congress, which is investigating allegations of racial discrimination in private lending. The paper, which is based on statistics from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, does not provide any evidence that lenders are charging higher rates to students in certain racial or ethnic groups. But it does show that low-income black students are the most likely of all students to take out private loans before they exhaust their federal loan eligibility.
http://chronicle.com Section: Government & Politics Volume 53, Issue 42, Page A22
