Jonah’s on the road to Penn State today for his debate with Peter Beinart, and forwarded this email from one of his correspondents:

I am a Vice President at [a large student loan department at a bank] . I have been in the student loans for over 20 years. I also worked with the with the Department of Education for years where I wrote regulations for the student loan program. (I left the Department when Hillary’s husband was President due in large part to the approach of his administration to student aid. There has been a lot of talk recently about student loan scandals. Here is the gist of the accusation: Lenders gave gifts to schools so that the schools would steer the student loan volume to them. For any other industry, this is a standard business practice — like a car dealership offering free hot dogs and a moonbounce for the kids. Here is a link that details the worst of the scandals according to Sen. Kennedy. Note the common theme, schools received money from lenders. I can tell you that in many cases that schools received significant dollars for “opportunity funds.” Essentially, the school got a pot of money that it could lend to “at-risk” students that would never qualify for a traditional loan. In all these news stories (that came from Kennedy and NY Attorney General Cuomo), there is not a single instance of a student receiving a loan with an above “market” interest rate. Nada, zero, zilch. It makes my blood boil to hear Clinton go on about “predatory student loan lenders” when there is not a single example to back her up. Student loans fall into two categories — Federal loans (where eligibility is determined by statute and the interest rates are all the same) and private loans which are credit based. Good credit = lower interest rate; Bad credit = higher interest rate. In our entire portfolio I believe Our products range from about 5.5% to about 14%. (All these rates are variable and tied to an index like prime.) Really, all this Democratic rhetoric is an excuse to attack the “money, grubbing banks.” It’s like these liberals are fascists or something. Someone should write a book. Can I be your student loan guy?

Aside from that expert testimony, there is this article which says that student loans from Sallie Mae are as high as 28% — but it doesn’t say anything about how those loans structured, how many students have received such high interest loans etc. Obviously, I’m still skeptical, but if anyone has more info about this let us know.