ANNE ARKY
Special to the Lampoon
WILLIAMSVILLE — Financial company Sallie Mae emailed numerous students last week, including yourself, to drop a friendly reminder that it knows where your family lives and that it has eyes everywhere. The email is nothing new for Sallie Mae, which probably owns you and your all friends, and holds everything you love as collateral.
Sallie Mae, whose reach is long and whose will is law, functions basically as a bank specializing in providing student loans, while an offshoot company called Navient — the Beelzebub to Sallie Mae’s Satan — takes over the much larger federal student loan business. Sallie Mae plans to eat $4 billion in the coming year; Navient is going to suck up $300 billion, digest it and gain its power.
Sallie Mae’s ungodly union with Navient comes after a series of federal lawsuits in which the company ended up paying millions in settlements. Legislation from 2010 made it illegal for private banks to intermediate federal student loans, and so Sallie Mae focused its illgotten dark powers, uttered an incantation, ate a goat heart and spawned the demon baby Navient to do its bidding in the realm of mortals.