Your Late Fees Make Sallie Mae Very Happy

The Village Voice reports:

Albert Lord, the chairman and past CEO of student loan leviathan Sallie Mae, is riding high these days. He holds a million shares of company stock, valued at $57.25 per share in the second week of January; he exercised options on another $15 million in the past two years. He leads a group bidding on the Washington Nationals baseball team, a power contest as much as a money one, with George Soros and Colin Powell also among the contenders. It was reported in early January that he's building his own private 18-hole golf course in suburban Maryland.

Meanwhile, Alan Collinge, a 35-year-old former aerospace engineer in Washington State, is feeling a little low. He originally borrowed $38,000 in student loans from Sallie Mae to complete three degrees at the University of Southern California. In 2001, after making about $7,000 in on-time payments, he left his gig at Caltech on the promise of a government job that evaporated after 9-11. He was underemployed for two years, making ends meet as a short-order cook in Alaska; his student loans went into default. "When I got back from Alaska, I got a bill for $85,000 and it pretty much blew me away. That's when I realized that somebody is making a lot of money around this deal." Today, Collinge owes $105,000 to the Department of Education.

There's no altruism in government subsidized education.Sallie Mae is the Fannie Mae of education.