Sallie Mae Gobbles Government Money at Expense of Students and Colleges

[Joanne98]

Sallie Mae has taken hundreds of millions of dollars from the government using the Education Department’s Participation Program and an astonishingly favorable loan from the Federal Home Loan Bank Board of Des Moines. Let’s see how much they got from two other government programs.

The ED Conduit Program

This program allows Sallie Mae to sell any FFELP Stafford or PLUS student loan made between October 2003 and July 2009 to the ED Conduit for 97% of face value of the note. The ED Conduit charges interest at market rates, and if the money coming in from the loans is inadequate to make the payments, the loans are sold to the Department of Education at 97% of face value. The Department asserts that it has controls in place to insure that student loan companies don’t just dump bad loans into this program. It isn’t easy to see how that would work.

The effect of this amazing program was to enable Sallie Mae and other student loan players to refinance any student loans that were financed at higher interest rates by private sources. Sallie Mae had an asset-backed loan facility from a consortium of banks to fund both its government student loans and its private loans. Under that loan, Sallie Mae would borrow money and pledge the loan to the consortium. We don’t know all the details of this transaction because they are contained in a side letter which wasn’t filed with the SEC.

The loan facility had a floating rate interest of either LIBOR or the commercial paper rate plus 1.3%, plus unstated up-front fees. In March 2009, one-month LIBOR was .56%. The loan facility was terminated in June 2009. In May 2009, Sallie Mae started using an ED Conduit that had an interest rate of .75% for 2009. 2010 10-K, p. F-53. Sallie Mae dumped a total of $14.6 billion into the program. That had the effect of lowering its interest obligations by about 1.1%. For the last six months of 2009, we can estimate a savings of $94.5 million

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