One Executive's Story Typifies Shifts In Student Loan Marketplace

NY Times column, Generation B, profiles employment challenges for a former Sallie Mae sales executive.  I thought this passage summarized the last 12-18 months in the student loan market:

Like steelworkers in the 1980s recession, Mr. Blattman was part of an industry, financial services, where entire companies and divisions collapsed and disappeared. “It wasn’t anything about me personally,” he says. “The world around me just changed overnight. Like East Germany, one day it was there, next day gone.”

Several factors were at play: credit markets contracted; a scandal over questionable ties between lenders and college aid offices put private lenders on the defensive; and Congress cut the subsidies paid to private lenders for issuing federally guaranteed loans, reducing profitability.

Mr. Blattman has many people to commiserate with, but few to network with. “Ninety percent of the people I worked with lost jobs,” he says.