[00:00:00] John Volpini: Credit to the private market. There’s plenty of lending capacity. The lending, the, the private market will easily absorb the money from the government. This year. We know that we’ve looked at it. Um, I also believe that most consumers, you know, will get a better deal.

[00:00:15] Narrator: Welcome to 22 Minutes in Lending. Your go-to podcast for insights on all things lending from lending practices, regulatory updates, how to enhance lending efforts and more.

[00:00:26] Narrator: In each episode, Vince Passione connects with industry leaders to discuss the latest trends and happenings around the lending industry. Let’s dive in to the latest in lending.

[00:00:40] Vince Passione: Welcome to 22 Minutes in Lending. I’m your host, Vince Passione. Today we’re getting into what might be the most consequential moment in student lending in a generation.

[00:00:48] Vince Passione: My guest is John Volpini, Vice President of Relationship Management at Sallie Mae. John has spent 20 years working at the intersection of schools, students, and the lending market. And for the past decade specifically, he’s been building and leading school relationships teams across undergraduate, graduate career, and international programs.

[00:01:04] Vince Passione: He also chairs the Board of Elm Resources, a private student loan management platform. Few people have a better read on how the education finance ecosystem actually functions in practice. John, it is great to have you on the show. How have you been?

[00:01:15] John Volpini: Great, Vince. How are you?

[00:01:16] Vince Passione: Really, really great. Now, John, just so we get it on the record, Sallie Mae is not a government entity anymore.

[00:01:22] Vince Passione: Mm-hmm. It’s not a gc it is a private company. It’s, it’s a publicly traded firm, right?

[00:01:26] John Volpini: Right. We’re publicly traded. Uh, we have been for well over a decade, and I believe the actual year that we converted to a bank was, uh, 20. 2005, and in 2006 we became under our new charter.

[00:01:38] Vince Passione: So John, before we jump into the big beautiful bill itself, I wanted to start what’s happening in the Department of Education.

[00:01:43] Vince Passione: We were sort of talking before the call and you know, we saw what happened with Doge, right? So the Office of the Federal Student Aid lost about 300 staffers, which I think was about roughly half. Oh, the entire organization disappeared. So now you’ve got the FSA, which oversees about, I guess it’s a trillion and a half dollars of student loans in the middle of implementing probably one of the biggest reforms in decades, and it has to happen all by July 1st.

[00:02:06] Vince Passione: So from where you sit working with schools every day, how’s this playing out? I mean, are they getting guidance that we talked about? Many of them didn’t believe what was gonna happen. It’s happening and now it’s happening with a, with a department that oversees the program that’s like half the size. So what are you seeing and what are they telling you as far as the support they’re getting?

[00:02:24] John Volpini: Uh, well, we’ve talked to many schools and we’ve seen several challenges. You know, making sure they understood how to process and how things were going to be calculated. With all the recent changes, that was the first hurdle. Many of them have received that guidance. Now they’re still waiting on guidance.

[00:02:39] John Volpini: If a student drops down to less than full time, and that’s supposed to be out shortly from the department, uh, we check on our schools, but it is highly stressful for them. I was on a, a recent, uh. Webinar back in, I believe in November and December about this with several schools, and they are very stressed and this is creating anxiety.

[00:02:57] John Volpini: I think what people also kind of lose track of is that the department is responsible for all the reporting that goes out about certain, you know, that’s on IEDs and other databases that’s out there, and that’s curious about whether that will be updated and how that will all kind of help schools in the future and help lending partners know about things like cost of attendance and other borrowing.

[00:03:15] John Volpini: But yes, you know, there is stress right now with the schools as a result of the change. They are working through it. Um, but it, it will be a challenging year for them as they go forward.

[00:03:24] Vince Passione: Yeah. Now John, there’s also this long-term structural question about where the federal loan program is ultimately gonna live.

[00:03:33] John Volpini: Mm-hmm.

[00:03:33] Vince Passione: And the administration started floating around moving it to treasury. And we’ve heard about Project 2025, it kind of called for it to revert back to sort of this federal government as a guarantor role. And you and I both know that kind of takes us back to where we were sort of pre 2010 with the fail model, right?

[00:03:50] Vince Passione: Where the private lenders are the originating and the government. Guarantees alone. How seriously should the industry take that scenario and what would it mean to the schools and students in navigating the system going forward?

[00:04:04] John Volpini: Honestly, Vince, I don’t really know if the government has that infrastructure available to it as it once did.

[00:04:09] John Volpini: I mean, I think that would be a, a significant undertaking. I know that, you know, you know, we support the car current, you know, government position on what the changes they’ve made. So I really don’t know if they could pull that off in a very quick period of time, but. You know, they’ve made significant changes this year.

[00:04:23] John Volpini: They might make significant changes going forward.

[00:04:25] Vince Passione: And John, just, just so our listeners understand that, I mean, the system was guaranteed by a bunch of state guarantors back in the day. Mm-hmm. Right?

[00:04:32] John Volpini: Right.

[00:04:33] Vince Passione: Some of whom are still around, they’re just, they’ve just changed their roles.

[00:04:36] John Volpini: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:37] Vince Passione: Um, so I, is that one of the big pieces of complexity you think that.

[00:04:40] Vince Passione: You’d have to reestablish these state guarantors, or you think the government would say, I don’t need the states. I’ll do this ourselves. The federal government will stand behind it, um, and do it. Is is that,

[00:04:49] John Volpini: that, that’s where the question I think really remains is what would it look like? Would they re try to re, you know, reconstitute what they once had or would they come up with something new?

[00:04:56] John Volpini: I think those are all the components that people would have to really step back and evaluate. And the one thing I will say is when the lenders were involved, they took great e effort into make sure things like servicing was done well. And the processing was done right, because they had a vested interest in the end borrower.

[00:05:12] Vince Passione: So John, let’s get to the big beautiful bill policy changes and, and, and some of the school impacts. We’ve talked about this in the past, so let, let’s go through some of them. So, so major changes, right? Grad, grad plus is, is basically eliminated, right? For all new borrowers starting July 1st. Graduate unsubsidized loans are now capped at 20,500 per year with a hundred thousand dollars lifetime limit Professional students, those are medical, dental law, they get about $50,000 per year and up to $200,000 lifetime.

[00:05:40] Vince Passione: And Parent Plus is capped at $20,000 a year with a $65,000 lifetime limit per student. So those are sort of the, when I went over the bill. Now every one of those programs pre, previously allowed to borrow, to borrow up to the full cost of attendance. So when you’re talking to the schools, right, we talked about this, what are what?

[00:05:59] Vince Passione: What are their reactions to the changes and what are they gonna be doing as far as changing financial aid packages, cost structure? What are they telling you?

[00:06:08] John Volpini: So when we meet with schools right now, the big. Piece that’s changing is many schools are stopping the packaging of plus loans and grad plus loans.

[00:06:14] John Volpini: ’cause clearly they, they’re not available anymore. And for years, many schools would package grad plus. So the borrower and the consumers would think, oh, I, I’m gonna take this

[00:06:21] Vince Passione: now, John, let’s stop again. Lemme stop you. For those that don’t understand that, what that award letter looks like. Mm-hmm. When you say packaging, you mean it shows up on the award letter, right?

[00:06:31] John Volpini: Correct. Right.

[00:06:32] Vince Passione: Okay.

[00:06:32] John Volpini: And when they put it on the award letter, many people would think that that was what they would take. Um, and they didn’t know all the private law loan options were available. We’ve been successful in talking with schools and, you know, having that process stopped at many schools. And when you do that and you bring, you know, opportunity for people to shop and compare, you end up getting more diversification in the Via.

[00:06:50] John Volpini: And the schools that have done that are actually very well positioned going into this year now. Other pieces of the things that we look at with schools, we talk to them about which programs need the most help still, and we prioritize those programs and we’ve been out meeting with them and discussing what Sallie Mae plans to do to help those schools.

[00:07:05] John Volpini: So we’re looking at, you know, focusing on medical and dental and vet and working our way through all the programs. Why? Because even though they have access, they still have. Big demand, big need. Beyond that, because those programs are expensive, it is still expensive to become a doctor or a dentist or a vet all the way down through a lawyer, and they’re likely gonna go beyond their traditional borrowing need from, you know, the government programs with grad plus being gone on the undergraduate side.

[00:07:29] John Volpini: It’s important to note that the average, you know, parent plus loan is between 21 and 24,000, but there are schools with average loan sizes of 34,000. That means they know they’re gonna have a se segment of consumers that will have a gap immediately, year one, and they’re gonna be out looking for those solutions in the private market as well.

[00:07:47] John Volpini: Now, credit to the private market, there’s plenty of lending capacity. The lending, the, the private market will easily absorb the money from the government this year. We know that we’ve looked at it. Um, I also believe that most consumers, you know, will get a better deal at many aspects, but from the private market, you know, they just don’t know that, that those deals were available.

[00:08:05] John Volpini: Those are the positive things. And when we talk with schools, that’s what we focus on. We literally show schools how their volume would break down their credit and that there’s a, you know, a great opportunity for them.

[00:08:15] Vince Passione: Now, John, when you say Great deal, just help our listeners understand that, right. You know, we, we, we facilitate, as you do, helping credit unions offer these products to their, to their members.

[00:08:23] Vince Passione: But you hear a lot on the hill coming from a whole bunch of different, you know, politicians that. You know, private loans are bad. Private loans basically charge exorbitant interest rates. Give us your sense of, hey, if you’re talking to one of our credit unions saying, well actually these consumers would get a better deal on the private side.

[00:08:40] Vince Passione: Give us a little data behind that.

[00:08:41] John Volpini: So when we look at it, that’s, we always take a look at, you know, where the average consumer is gonna fall. Now remember, there is a fee associated with plus loans today, right? And it’s not, you know, it’s 4.266, and then when you look at that. You factor in the average interest rate in that loan that brings that loan up on an a PR basis pretty high.

[00:09:00] John Volpini: And we know that most people in the, you know, top two or three credit segments will be better or at that same rate. And then when you just start to drop down lower credit segments, they’ll be a little higher. I think the people lose track of, is that the private banking industry? We do risk adjusted pricing.

[00:09:18] John Volpini: So if you’re a good quality consumer, you should always look and see where you can get the best deal. You know, there are some people who will be challenged with credit and then they, you know, they’ll, they may get a better deal to the federal government. And that’s just one of those things that lenders look at.

[00:09:31] John Volpini: But that is truly the case and that’s what we sit with, with schools and talk about, you know, the quality consumers will end up in a much better place. People with more challenging credit will have those challenges. That will, will persist.

[00:09:43] Vince Passione: Agreed. I think the data helps, it helps, uh, establish the rationale behind the statement.

[00:09:47] Vince Passione: Hey, John, there’s been a lot of research that says, and, and certainly I, I, I personally feel like this as well, that these caps could actually put some downward pressure on, you know, let’s just take the one, the programs that are hit the most, these graduate and professional tuition costs. Do you buy that argument and, and do you really think the schools will respond by lowering costs or do you think they’re just gonna find other ways to bridge the gap?

[00:10:09] John Volpini: I think that we’re gonna hopefully see an influx of more money coming in. Either reduction in, you know, the ability to raise tuition, but also just more scholarship money and other funds that can come in to help mitigate these gaps. This year I’ve met with many schools who say they’re not worried about it.

[00:10:23] John Volpini: They’re gonna meet unmet needs, and that’s what you really hope for. And that’s what, now there are gonna be schools who can’t do that, and I think that will be the challenge. I don’t think it’s a broad brush. It’s gonna go up or it’s gonna go down. I think it’s really gonna be on a case by case basis, and schools will have to each solve this in their own way.

[00:10:39] John Volpini: I think it would be great if it did lower tuition. I’d like you, we are a gap financing company and you know what? We don’t want tuition to keep going up every year. We would like it to come become sustained.

[00:10:49] Vince Passione: Yeah.

[00:10:49] John Volpini: I also think that, you know, there are schools who will do the right thing and step in. I also think there are schools who will have the challenge that they can’t, and then they might rely on the private market a little bit more.

[00:10:57] John Volpini: But I think when people broad brush these schools, I think that’s, you kind of do them a little bit of a disservice because their schools are gonna solve these solutions. Uh, you know, based on what the, you know, what the institutional needs truly are.

[00:11:08] Vince Passione: Now, John, do you think that the cap would change the way families make decisions about what schools to attend?

[00:11:16] Vince Passione: I mean, you know, I always used to joke around and say, you’ve got these, some families that it’s all about the bumper sticker, right?

[00:11:22] John Volpini: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:22] Vince Passione: Right? And and maybe that’s not the best choice. For their family member, their, their child, right to go to that school. Maybe it’s best they go two years of community college before they go to a four year private, private, uh, private institution.

[00:11:35] Vince Passione: Do, do you think it’s gonna change the way families make choices about schools?

[00:11:40] John Volpini: What I can say, Vince, is, you know, being in this industry for as long as I have, every year the phone rings and I get to do that personal one-on-one conversation with consumers,

[00:11:48] Vince Passione: right?

[00:11:48] John Volpini: And for the last five years, when those calls happen, it’s always people saying.

[00:11:54] John Volpini: I just wanna find a really good deal that fits my son or daughter, or I don’t want them to graduate with a hundred thousand dollars in debt. And those are the conversations you love to have. The one I don’t like to have is I’ve got no money and my son got nowhere to school. It costs 40,000 a year. Then I’m, oh my God, this is, this isn’t gonna help.

[00:12:09] John Volpini: You know, it’s a little that’s late. But what we’re seeing is what, what I’ve personally have seen is people try to make a very good financial decision. I think this will help this situation. I think people will be forced a little bit more to make those financial decisions and evaluate. Different products to making the best financial decision to pay for college.

[00:12:32] Vicki Roscoe Erickson: Hello, I’m Vicki Roscoe Erickson, senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Top Line Financial Credit Union in Minnesota. We’ve been working with LendKey and member student lending since 2010 to offer private student loans and student loan refinancing to our members. As the cost of higher education continues to rise, students and families are seeking new financing solutions, and that’s where our partnership comes in.

[00:12:58] Vicki Roscoe Erickson: It provides us the opportunity to assist members and their families with affordable education loan options. So far, we’ve been able to help nearly 800 members with over 1500 loans totaling over $2 million. This is an amazing opportunity to support our members at the beginning of their financial and education journeys.

[00:13:25] Vince Passione: So, John, let’s talk a little about repayment. So also in, in the big beautiful Bill, right, there used to be a, a whole bunch of different options, almost too many for how a student could repay a federal loan, but start on July 1st. Then they just have, they have two choices, right? They can do this fixed payment plan or they can do this new re repayment assistant plan, I guess they call wrap, where the monthly payment’s tied to what you earn, which seems to make a lot of sense.

[00:13:48] Vince Passione: But for someone that’s graduating into repayment for the first time, you know these different choices, right? Is is simpler or necessarily better? I mean, what’s your experience? Do you think it’s better? Do you think that all the choices confuse people and this just makes it real easy for that graduate to figure out how they pay back their federal loans?

[00:14:07] John Volpini: So. Like, you know, we’ve experienced that too many options. Makes it very difficult for the, you know, mm-hmm. For any servicer to execute. So streamlining does help in a lot of respects from that end. You know, always simplifying the process, giving these services an opportunity to kind of make sure they’re connecting with people.

[00:14:22] John Volpini: You know, I think the big thing isn’t so much the options is to make sure that the consumer is connecting with the servicer and understanding what those options are and what they mean. If it’s tied to your income, and that’s great and it helps you get through. What do we all always talk about, Vince is, you know, it’s the first two and three years when the student gets out where they need the most help.

[00:14:41] John Volpini: That’s it. They may have a hiccup down the road, but it’s those first couple of years. If you can get people through those early stages, then they kind of flow through and they get in a good cycle and then you’re fine. Look, you can never, you can never really prepare for a COVID-19 where everything shuts down.

[00:14:56] John Volpini: That’s gonna happen. But the government has programs for that. We have forbearance options and the private market has options for that as well. Um, you know, what I look at is at Sallie Mae, we actually work with a lot of consumers, unlike you do at Lendkey, that when they go into repayment, you help them figure out repayment solutions, but you don’t have an endless amount of options.

[00:15:15] John Volpini: Because at some point you just have to be able, whether they can make the payment or they can’t. And if they can’t, then you gotta figure out what you’re going to do with those consumers.

[00:15:22] Vince Passione: Now, John, we’ve talked about when this was all sort of on the drawing board, the impact of this big change with the big beautiful bill.

[00:15:30] Vince Passione: So, you know, if you look at the research right, it looks like the changes introduced by the big beautiful bill will probably reduce federal loan vibe from eight to 10 billion annually. Private education market on an annual basis originates somewhere between, what, 12 to 15 billion a year. And obviously Sallie may originates about half of that, right?

[00:15:49] Vince Passione: So congratulations on that, John. Um, but that’s a pretty big funding gap, and you’ve kind of said it a few times earlier in the podcast. You’d think that gap is easily filled by the private lending market wouldn’t have a problem absorbing it. And do you agree that’s about the size of the market, that the market could almost get close to doubling as a result of this change?

[00:16:09] John Volpini: Well, we look at it as like in 2026, we think there’s about $1.2 billion that will come into this space. And if you look at the lending capacity between Sallie Mae and so you know, so far yourself and Citizens Bank. Just the top three or four lenders alone will be able to absorb Mo most of that. But there’s actually a very large number of lenders in this space.

[00:16:27] John Volpini: It’s gonna give many entities the opportunity to kind of grow. And that’s, that’s a good thing. And we look at the state agencies that are still in, like Mifa and Rizla and you know, they’re gonna, they’re gonna grab their share as well.

[00:16:37] Narrator: Mm-hmm.

[00:16:37] John Volpini: The next three years, that ramps up to $5.2 billion. You have that opportunity where it’ll grow, but it will grow over time.

[00:16:44] John Volpini: And that’s the benefit of it being a grandfathered approach, that you know you’re gonna have students rolling off new freshman, new freshman class and new first year graduates coming in. But there are about 4 million graduate students. And yes, over the next three years, the vast majority of ’em will need funding from the private market.

[00:17:00] John Volpini: And that’s, that’s okay. Private market stands at the ready. We’ll be fine.

[00:17:04] Vince Passione: Now, John, we talked a little about credit, um, credit quality. There is this sort of credit access question underneath all this, right? So I think the number is about 40% of federal student borrowers have credit scores that are too low to qualify for, for private student loan.

[00:17:20] Vince Passione: And I know Sallie can, can sometimes kind of deal with even some of the, those lower FIO students, but private lending typically requires a co-signer. And last year I know in our portfolio, I think yours as well, over 90% of our undergraduate loans were co-sign. So, so the students’ most impacted by these federal caps may be.

[00:17:39] Vince Passione: The least able to access the private market? Is that a true statement? And

[00:17:43] John Volpini: that I, I mean, it’s hard to always say that those are true statements are false statements. Underwriting is about the through the door population who comes in, and right now in the graduate space for years, all the, the vast majority of that volume, 90% of it went to the go.

[00:17:55] John Volpini: It and now for the first time, you’re gonna have the private space, the get the ability to have first shot. At a lot of consumers. What we know is this, you’re right, undergraduate loans, which is the vast majority of what everybody was doing, were 90% co-signed, and the vast majority of those are co-signed by parents.

[00:18:11] John Volpini: What we see in the future is the graduate space will have an inverse of that. You know, it’ll be 60, 70% will not be co-signed. We think 20, 30% still might be co-signed, and that’s where we’ll look and that’s what we’ll change. That will change the dynamics of the private space. We have history to fall back on.

[00:18:27] John Volpini: Right Prior to this, that’s what it looked like. We had better credit quality, we had access to the better credits in the graduate space. So we think the approval rates will rise.

[00:18:36] Vince Passione: Hey John, I’m gonna roll you back a little bit. You made a statement and I believe it as you do. ’cause I’ve been in this industry for a long time, and that is that, hey.

[00:18:44] Vince Passione: If you, if you underwrite correctly, uh, it makes all the sense in the world to do this, right? And the way we talk about doing, which is, Hey, we’re gonna make a, we’re gonna make a loan to someone who is gonna go out, achieve their educational dreams, obtain this degree, and then enter the workforce. It just makes all the sense in the world, right?

[00:19:00] Vince Passione: We believe in that dream. But you and I both know, when you go around and talk to lenders, there are a lot of lenders that don’t believe in that, right? They’re skeptical, they’re very concerned. Is it. They’re just confused between what they hear on the federal side versus the private side, or is it, this asset is just so overregulated I’ll fight any excuse not to be in it.

[00:19:20] John Volpini: This is a highly seasonable space that has in year round infrastructure. That’s one thing for a bank. You know, this isn’t like mortgage lending or credit card lending. Auto lending where it’s year round and you can almost always do it, and it moves with rates and fees and competitive environment. This is 80% of the volume comes through in one shot.

[00:19:38] John Volpini: You know, and then there’s another secondary bump later on in the year, and that’s really, I think, sometimes challenging for lenders. Yeah. From a marketing standpoint. And that second, you are asking the lenders to get behind a product where the vast majority of people don’t make a payment for the first couple of years.

[00:19:53] John Volpini: They’re, they get the loan. That’s challenging for a credit committee and a bank to kind of get comfortable with as well, because you know, loans sold

[00:20:00] Vince Passione: book, they book the accrued interest. I mean, come on, you guys do that. I mean,

[00:20:04] John Volpini: we do that, but we also understand the loss curves and we have

[00:20:06] Vince Passione: right,

[00:20:07] John Volpini: decades and decades of data.

[00:20:08] John Volpini: But you know, if you’re a lender and you’re standing back and you’re sitting down and you’re thinking to yourself, I’m gonna make a loan where someone’s not gonna pay me for four or five years, and if it’s a doctor that’s seven years. That’s not comfortable for a bank to be in. You can be booking it all you want, you can however you track it.

[00:20:23] John Volpini: But that is one of the challenges. And so, you know, that’s why I think a lot of these other options for lenders to get in and just, you know, help their customers by experiencing it through you or us and other entities are a great first step. To get in because I think that they should be looking at that.

[00:20:36] John Volpini: But it is hard, Vince.

[00:20:38] Vince Passione: Yeah, no, fair point. So John, let’s just talk about Pell Grants before we end up here. So that was another big provision, right in the big beautiful bill is Pell Grants, the vocational and workforce training programs. And that’s like, that’s an industry first coming from the government.

[00:20:50] Vince Passione: So is that a good thing? Is that a good thing for students? I know Sallie,

[00:20:54] John Volpini: we love, we always like an increase in Pell Grants. They go right to the people who need it the most. And I encourage families always to get that fast and as fast as possible. ’cause the free money goes fastest. You know, as you know, like that money runs out occasionally and we need to make sure people get that, but that goes to a large segment of consumers who do not get a lot of other financing options.

[00:21:13] John Volpini: So yes, we are a big believer in pushing people to get those Pell Grants. We like the funding of Pell Grants. We like it when people go out and, uh, leveraging those programs. We, you know, the 30 years, Vince, if I’m doing the same way, one of the things I love about the Sallie Mae uh, mission is it aligns to my personal mission, which is get your free money first.

[00:21:31] John Volpini: Get your federal money second. Then you can come and get your gap financing in third. That is what you should be doing. And we always encourage that, you know, not just the Pell Grants, but get every scholarship dollar you can. You know, as you and I both know, there are plenty of borrowers who need our help, you know?

[00:21:46] Vince Passione: Right.

[00:21:46] John Volpini: Get your free money first. Yeah.

[00:21:48] Vince Passione: Now, John, but they, they’re expanding these Pell grants for vocational and workforce training that’s never happened before. And I guess, is that a gonna accelerate the shift away from four year degrees you think? And I mean, I always think it’s a good thing, right? For this particular, for, for, for certain population.

[00:22:04] Vince Passione: Look, I mean, last time I checked, you know, the, you know, the plumber that shows up at my home, you know, he makes a pretty good living.

[00:22:11] John Volpini: Make a great living. You know, I, I always encourage people the same way. I, I believe, listen, I think anytime the government steps in and will help people become, grab a trade, get a skill.

[00:22:20] John Volpini: If that helps. And it doesn’t mean that because you have a trade or something, you don’t go to college still, or that you went to college and you still don’t wanna get a trade. I think that that mindset has to ship for a lot of folks. I think that sometimes people think it’s an either or. The fact is that you and I both know many times it’s, it’s one in addition.

[00:22:35] John Volpini: You know, it’s one in one.

[00:22:36] Vince Passione: So, John, last question. Right? So you, I say you’ve been in the industry two decades. It sounds like it’s three John, but you don’t look that, that old, uh, and you’ve seen, like I have, you’ve seen fell. You saw 2010 when the government introduced the direct student loan program in nationalized student lending.

[00:22:51] Vince Passione: We both lived through the pandemic, the forbearance era. So in terms of structural significance, what, where does a big beautiful bill rank and what’s the, what’s the thing you think the market’s most underestimating right now?

[00:23:05] John Volpini: I think it ranks right behind the, when the government pushed the lenders outta the private out of the federal state loan space.

[00:23:10] John Volpini: I think that was such a significant change and it pivoted the entire industry and that made it very challenging for lenders like the bigger lenders to stay in because the industry shrank down and became really hyperfocused on just a small segment of consumers and a highly seasonal business. Uh, I think that that’s the critical, I think as we go forward, I think that will be the piece that we’re gonna continue to kinda evolve on.

[00:23:31] John Volpini: I think that’s gonna continue to provide new opportunities. And I know that the private space will step up and I think you’re gonna see some great things to continue to happen and we’re gonna be able to respond and show people that the private space has always been able to help students and families.

[00:23:45] John Volpini: You plan, pay and save for college. And I think this is just a, a great opportunity for many lenders to kind of. Really think and read about how they wanna connect with students and families.

[00:23:54] Vince Passione: I agree. I agree. Well, listen, John, uh, as expected, always fascinated to talk to you. Uh, I think all this kinda underscores how much is in motion right now for students, for the schools, and anyone working in education, finance.

[00:24:05] Vince Passione: So there’s a lot of head for the industry and thanks so much for joining us.

[00:24:09] John Volpini: Well, Vince, thank you for the opportunity. I always love catching up with you, my friend. Stay safe.

[00:24:13] Vince Passione: Awesome. To our listeners, if you haven’t already, subscribe to 22 minutes in lending. Make sure you do so, so you never miss an episode, and we will see you back here next time.

[00:24:19] Vince Passione: John, thanks again.

[00:24:22] Narrator: Thank you for listening to the 22 Minutes in Lending podcast. We hope you enjoy today’s episode. You’ll find links to any resources mentioned in the show notes. If you’re enjoying our show, please be sure to subscribe and leave us a five star review.