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*Hallelujah chorus begins*

US News and World Report (via Yahoo!) reported on Friday that the Department of Education was shutting down its student loan database because of marketing abuses. Between my wife and I we get, on average, three solicitations for student loan consolidation every single day. Most of them could be graciously called confusing and are written to look like they are coming from a company that already has your student loan.

We’ve gotten pretty good at shredding the adverts but every once in a while they’ll get us to take a second look to make sure it’s not something important. We consolidated both of our loans when interest rates were in the toilet and are paying something like 2.25% on our loans. Though it’s a nice try to trick us into a higher rate!

Lenders are complaining that some loans will take longer to process because of the shutdown. They say it may affect where kids can go to school if they can’t get a timely response. That would be an issue, but there has been clear misuse of the system and it’s about time the Feds did something to prevent the gross misuse of the information.

It may be the case of a few bad apples, but in this case they really do spoil the bunch.