It’s Occupy Sallie Mae!
The nation’s largest student lender is being besieged by student activists plunged into financial hell by their ballooning debt.
The grass-roots movement is demanding sweeping reforms from the $10 billion Delaware-based behemoth and an end to its controversial lobbying practices.
A look at the statistics shows the scope of the student-debt burden, which has tripled in size since 2004 and now exceeds the nation’s total credit-card debt.
Student loans are now the biggest nonmortgage debt burden in America today, according to a Federal Reserve study.
All told, 33 percent of borrowers in repayment are delinquent.
Recent grad Sami Alloy, 31, visiting New York from Oregon, where she’s a campaign manager for a local political party, proposes a public fund that would allow students to graduate at public universities and colleges without debt.
The costs would be shared through public funding and small contributions from students’ income after graduation. That idea sits well across party lines in Oregon.
“I am staring down the barrel of that gun as I age,” said Alloy, who has $18,000 in student debt and is worried about being unable to fund a retirement account. She manages to pay off $200 each month from her $1,800 monthly take-home pay.
“We’re looking for relief from Sallie Mae,” said Sara Fitori, 23, aboard a bus with other outraged students and activists that pulled out of Union Square early Thursday morning.
The bus was headed to a rally against Sallie Mae in Newark, Del., as the embattled lender was hosting its annual shareholder meeting. “The ultimate goal is principal loan reduction,” Fitori told The Post.
Fitori, who is a graduate of Ithaca College in upstate New York, has found herself saddled with $145,000 of student debt and is terrified.
“I can’t get a job that would help me pay it back,” she said.
At a White House event on Friday, President Obama pushed Congress to pass an extension of a program to keep student loan interest rates from rising, saying, “Higher education cannot be a luxury for a privileged few. It is an economic necessity that every family should be able to afford.”
The president called on Congress to extend the 3.4 percent federally subsidized student loan plan; rates could double to 6.8 percent next month if no action is taken by July 1.
“It’s like a $1,000 tax hike,” the president said.
Sallie Mae, issuer of 25 million student loans, owns $162.5 billion in debt from them. That’s a big pile of the nearly $1 trillion in US student debt.
The student-rally leaders said new CEO Jack Remondi has agreed to meet with them in the coming weeks.
And a resolution that was filed by students, who are shareholders, urged a policy of full transparency in Sallie Mae’s high-stakes lobbying practices, on which Sallie has spent $17 million since 2008.