Daily Lobo new mexico
thursday September 4, 2014 | Volume 119 | Issue 14
The Independent Student Voice of UNM since 1895
Act helps borrowers to defeat defaults By Jyllian Roach
William Aranda / Daily Lobo / @_WilliamAranda
A resident of The Cottages departs from the student living complex Wednesday afternoon. Incidents at The Cottages have caught the attention of police since its opening in August.
Constraints strain Cottagers’ conduct By Erika Eddy Student residents at the Cottages of New Mexico said they are unhappy with recent changes made by the property’s management. Residents of the housing development, which is marketed to college students, received an email over the weekend stating that each resident will be allowed to invite one guest at a time, and parties will no longer be permitted. Previously, residents could invite up to five guests and register a party with management that could run until 2 a.m. Brianna Gallegos, a junior multimedia journalism major, said living at the Cottages is different than
she thought it would be since the implementation of the new rules. “I feel like they’re babysitting us and we’re all adults here,” she said. “They’re dictating our social life.” After living at Lobo Village for the last three years, Matt Quintana, a senior English and history major, said he moved to the Cottages because of its image as something more exciting. Quintana said management overreacted by instituting the new rules — that they should have communicated better with residents about the reasons behind the changes. He said the rules also go too far in policing issues, and easily get in the way of other activities. “There are certain circumstances where (the one guest rule) doesn’t
make much sense,” Quintana said. “Like if you want both of your parents to come over.” The changes in policy were announced in the wake of an alcohol-fueled party at the beginning of the semester. The Albuquerque Police Department estimated an attendance of some 600 people at the Aug. 23 event. Early on Aug. 24, two men fired guns while still on Cottages property. No one was hurt, but police arrested Tyvon Green and Shanoah Cauley for the shooting, as well as a traffic incident, later that day. Neither man appears in the UNM directory. Alexandria Perea, a CNM freshman double major in physical fitness and theatrical arts, said she attended the party even though she
is not a resident and does not know anyone who lives there. “It was a popping thing that was going on,” she said. “Everyone was just going.” Perea said she had never been to the complex before then, and does not plan on returning. “There were just too many opportunities for something to go down,” she said. “Sometimes a random person would invite us in (to their apartment). There were too many different crowds.” According to an email from Cottages property manager Lindsey Maestas, the complex has hired a new security team to implement their policies,
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Cottages page 2
Refugees find relief in students By Jonathan Baca
Refugees from around the world are getting support they desperately need, while students working with them are learning life-changing lessons. UNM’s Refugee Well-Being Program is a two-semester course that pairs sociology, psychology and anthropology students with refugees living in Albuquerque. The students help refugees access resources like jobs, housing, school for their children and healthcare, as well as help with the basics of adjusting to a new culture. In the process, students learn about the cultures, traditions and struggles of the families they are helping, through community meals and discussion groups. Suha Amer is an interpreter and researcher with the program. When she and her family moved
from Iraq as refugees in 2008, she said the program was like a lifeline for them. “When you come to a strange country, you have no one here to help you,” Amer said. “It’s as if you do not know how to swim and you are thrown out on the sea. So a friend is really a life saver for you; it’s very precious to me.” Because Amer was an English teacher in Iraq, she was recruited as an interpreter for her fellow Iraqis in the program. And the students helped her family immensely, showing her how to enroll her son in school and get him on a baseball team, and even helping her enroll at UNM, where she attended graduate school, she said. Brandon Baca, research coordinator for the Refugee Well-Being Project, graduated in 2008. He became involved with the project when he took the course as an undergraduate, and he said it was a
life-changing experience. “It was really eye-opening, and it inspired me to do something positive with the refugee community, and also maybe even internationally,” Baca said. “Then, after I got paired with a family, I really formed strong relationships with a lot of the refugee community here. I was just amazed at how resilient they all were.” Albuquerque adopts hundreds of refugees a year and is the only city in New Mexico that takes in refugees, he said. Students enroll in the course Health and Social Inequalities, in the first half of which they learn the skills they need to work with refugees, as well as study the unique cultural challenges refugees face when trying to integrate into a new society, Baca said. In the second half of the class, students begin working personally with families. For two
hours a week they participate in Learning Circles, where Baca facilitates group discussions among the students and families. They then break into one-onone groups, in which students help their refugee partners in an area of the refugee’s choosing, ranging from speaking and reading English to learning American culture and laws to filling out job applications, he said. “It’s mutual, so it really gives students a chance to learn from the refugees as well, because they bring a lot of experience to our community,” Baca said. The other part of the course’s second semester is advocacy, where students work on the ground with the refugees in their communities, helping them to access resources they otherwise may not be able to navigate.
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Refugees page 2
Student loan borrowers will soon have better options when it comes to paying off their debts. The U.S. Department of Education announced Friday that federal student loan servicers now have more incentives to help keep students from defaulting on their loans. Among these incentives are a customer satisfaction survey, which will serve as an indicator as to which servicer gets the most loans. The better the satisfaction scores, the more loans it may provide. “All hard-working students and families deserve high-quality support from their federal loan servicer, and we are continuing to take steps to make sure that is the case,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a press release. The plan, according to the announcement, is to encourage loan servicers to work with borrowers and keep them out of default. This change comes on the heels of skyrocketing student loan debt throughout the country. The new servicer incentive is part of the larger Student Loan Forgiveness Act focused on limiting the monthly repayment amounts of former students. The act guarantees students more payment options for their debts, including the Pay As You Earn program, which caps loan repayments at 10 percent of a person’s discretionary income. After 20 years of steady payment, the remaining debt is forgiven. The second program, the Income-Based Repayment, requires 15 percent of a payee’s discretionary income. The remaining debt is forgiven after 25 years. Earlier this year, the White House announced that it held $1.1 trillion in student loans taken out by approximately 40 million people. That’s $125 billion more than at the same time last year, according to the report. Roughly eight million of those people are in default status on their loans. For UNM, about 10 percent of student loan borrowers defaulted on their loans in 2011, according to the Department of Education. Lexi Schuman is one of the 500 borrowers in default. Schuman said she graduated in 2005 with degrees in chemistry and psychology, and she thinks she has $7,000 worth of loans in default, but she doesn’t know the exact amount — or even who owns her loans. “It was sold to somebody and sold to somebody else, so I couldn’t even figure out who to pay for the last couple of years,” she said. Although Schuman cannot find the owners of her loan, they found her earlier this year when, Schuman said, she found out her federal tax return was taken to repay a portion of the loan. “It was $2,300 taken to pay for
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Loans page 2