On the section of its website dedicated to helping borrowers who are having trouble making their mon

President Barack Obama, surrounded by college students, makes a statement on student loans in the Rose Garden of the White House May 31, 2013 in Washington, DC. Obama made existing car rental los angeles student loan programs an issue during his campaign last year while visiting many college campuses across the U.S. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
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Companies working for the Department of Education over the past year have allowed hundreds car rental los angeles of thousands of borrowers to default on their federal student loans rather than enrolling them in the Obama administration's debt-relief programs, new data reveal.
In results that have invited comparisons to the Treasury Department's lackluster distressed car rental los angeles homeowner initiative known as HAMP , about as many student loan borrowers defaulted on their federal debts as were aided by the administration's three main initiatives meant to avert defaults, according to the Education Department figures.
President Barack Obama has made two of those programs -- Income-Based Repayment and a similar initiative known as Pay As You Earn -- central to what he described in August as his "personal mission" to make a college education more affordable for middle-class families. The two initiatives are more generous to borrowers than the third and similar program known as Income-Contingent Repayment.
All three programs cap monthly payments relative to borrowers' incomes. Borrowers with high debt loads or low wages generally car rental los angeles would benefit most from the initiatives, though only recent borrowers are eligible for Pay As You Earn.
Some 600,000 borrowers who took on debt from the government's Direct Loan program to pay for college entered default in the 12 months ending in June, according to Education Department data obtained by The Huffington Post. Over the same period, about 620,000 car rental los angeles borrowers car rental los angeles with loans from that program took advantage of the debt-relief initiatives.
That breaks out to 630,000 borrowers enrolling in Income-Based Repayment, which launched in 2009; 50,000 borrowers falling out of Income-Contingent Repayment, a less charitable initiative that began in 1994; and 40,000 borrowers joining Pay As You Earn, which is the most generous of the three programs and launched last December.
Those figures worry some federal policymakers and student debt experts, who expected enrollment in the debt-relief programs to increase far more than it did after the White House prioritized them in June 2012, in the midst of the presidential campaign. Obama personally car rental los angeles urged Education Secretary Arne Duncan car rental los angeles to focus on Income-Based Repayment .
All told, about 1.6 million people , or 10 percent of the nearly 16 million car rental los angeles borrowers with student debt from the government's Direct Loan program who are either repaying their loans or in forbearance or deferment schemes, are enrolled in the three debt-relief plans. Though that number still lags the 2.1 million borrowers in default , the gap has narrowed over the past year.
Despite the White House-driven improvements to Income-Based Repayment, millions of other student borrowers who likely qualify for the debt-relief programs are not being enrolled. In December, an economist at Barclays, the UK bank, estimated in a note to clients that more than half of borrowers with federal student loans last year qualified for lower payments under IBR. The note quickly made the rounds car rental los angeles among federal policymakers in Washington, particularly at the Treasury Department.
"Higher education should be a pathway to opportunity, rather than to financial car rental los angeles havoc," said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). "The Department of Education, Sallie Mae, and other servicers must work to limit default by making repayment options, like Income-Based Repayment, more accessible and understandable for borrowers."
"For federal student loans, there's no reason why students should be defaulting. It's a shame," said Rory O'Sullivan, policy car rental los angeles director at Young Invincibles, an advocacy group representing 18- to 34-year-olds. "It's unfortunate we have these good plans out there, but we just don't do enough to help people car rental los angeles get into them. The system we have now clearly is not working."
With student debt levels now approaching $1.2 trillion, government concerns are mounting that the number of borrowers in default and the number with high monthly payments risk sapping U.S. economic growth. As borrowers devote higher car rental los angeles shares of their incomes car rental los angeles to repaying their debt for longer periods of time, they reduce purchases of big-ticket items such as cars and homes, investments in potential new small businesses, and savings for retirement.
"We've got a crisis car rental los angeles in terms of college affordability and student car rental los angeles debt," Obama said in an Aug. 22 speech at the State University of New York in Buffalo. "Our economy can't afford car rental los angeles the trillion dollars in outstanding student loan debt, much of which may not get repaid because students don't have the capacity to pay it."
Speaking the next day at another school in upstate New York, SUNY Binghamton, Obama warned that if young people are "burdened with tens of thousands of dollars of debt, in some cases it's impossible for them ever to pay it off, or they have to put off buying a home, or starting a business, or starting a family."
Chris Greene, a spokesman for the Education Department, car rental los angeles said the roughly equal increases in the number of borrowers in default and the number enrolling in debt-relief plans over the past year was "purely coincidental."
"First, borrowers entering default are likely at very different points in their repayment car rental los angeles lifecycle than borrowers entering IBR or Pay As You Earn," Greene said. "Second, borrowers default for different reasons, and not every borrower that defaults is eligible for the Income-Based Repayment Program or the Pay As You Earn program."
Yet falling wages and low employment -- the two main reasons why borrowers default -- suggest that millions more borrowers are eligible car rental los angeles for the programs. Median weekly wages for bachelor's degree holders have fallen 4.8 percent over the last 10 years, according to inflation-adjusted data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Weekly paychecks for all college-degree holders over the age of 25 are down by 3 percent. car rental los angeles The share of the working-age population holding jobs or looking for work fell last month to 63.2 percent, the lowest level since 1978, according to Labor Department data.
The Education Department considers delinquent loans to be in default after the borrower has been late for 270 days, or nine months, and it does not disclose the number of delinquent borrowers with federal student loans. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York , however, suggest the number of delinquent borrowers is increasing. About $52 billion in student loans that were being paid on time fell behind in the first half of the year, the highest first-half total in New York Fed data dating to 2003. Some 10.9 percent of student loans were at least 90 days delinquent as of June 30, 2 percentage points higher than the same period last year.
Since delinquent borrowers qualify for debt-relief programs until they've entered default, and borrowers generally fall behind on their loans after losing a job or income, car rental los angeles student debt experts are questioning why more distressed borrowers were not funneled into the debt-relief initiatives.
Asher urged the Obama administration to do "everything in its power" to ensure servicers such as SLM Corp., the student loan company better known as Sallie Mae, are informing struggling borrowers of the debt-relief programs.
But servicers are not obligated to place troubled borrowers into programs that link their required monthly payments to their incomes. car rental los angeles For example, Sallie Mae's contract with the Education Department specifies car rental los angeles that "servicers will have full discretion to promote or not promote services as long as they meet legislative and regulatory requirements and are cost neutral to the government."
On the section of its website dedicated to helping borrowers who are having trouble making their monthly payments, Sallie Mae promotes car rental los angeles schemes known as deferment and forbearance that temporarily relieve borrowers from making payments, while mentioning the government's debt-relief plans only in passing.
"Pay As You Earn is featured on our federal loan servicing car rental los angeles home page, and we provide [income-driven repayment] information multiple times in multiple ways: website, video, email, phone, letters, and web chat," said Patricia Nash Christel, a Sallie Mae spokeswoman. "In the last year alone we sent more than 50 million communications car rental los angeles to customers advising them of payment options, including income-driven repayment, and we field approximately 50,000 monthly calls about IDR."
Some policymakers have proposed reducing the role played by servicers and making car rental los angeles enrollment in the debt-relief programs effectively automatic. Rep. Thomas Petri (R-Wis.) has introduced legislation that would deduct payments on federal student loans from workers' paychecks, tying the payment amount to wages "to eliminate much of the administrative complexity that makes current IBR cumbersome for borrowers to use," he said .
In an April opinion on a case involving a debtor who wished to discharge her student loans by declaring bankruptcy, Daniel Manion, a senior judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, recommended that IBR enrollment be required for those borrowers "who have concluded that there is no way they can pay off the debt."
Top current and former officials at the White House have been trying to increase awareness of the debt-relief programs to help more borrowers. Obama himself has mentioned Income-Based Repayment and Pay As You Earn several times in speeches.
Some student advocates claim