The Funder and the Collector: How Ascendium Holds $8 Billion in Defaulted Student Loans While Bankrolling Prison Education

The Organization Everyone in Prison Education Answers To

If you work in prison education in America, Ascendium Education Group is in the room whether you invited it or not. It funds the journalists who cover your field. It trains the reporters who write about your programs. It distributes grants to the colleges your students attend. It shapes the policy environment your programs operate in. And, depending on your students’ loan history, it may be collecting on the debt that bars them from enrollment.

Ascendium describes itself as a nonprofit committed to expanding postsecondary access for learners from low-income backgrounds. That description holds up. The organization distributes over $100 million annually in grants. Its Ready for Pell initiative put $4.7 million into strengthening emerging prison education programs ahead of the 2023 Pell reinstatement. Its media grants cover Open Campus, the Marshall Project, the Hechinger Report, and the Associated Press. It funds the research that defines what “evidence-based” means in this space, and it funds the evaluators who assess whether programs meet that standard. By every standard measure of philanthropic output, Ascendium is the most consequential single actor in prison education in the country.

What the annual reports don’t lead with is the other half. Ascendium is also the nation’s largest federal student loan guaranty agency — the administrator of a Federal Family Education Loan Program portfolio that, as of fiscal year 2021, included approximately $8 billion in defaulted student loans. That figure comes from Department of Education records produced in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Student Borrower Protection Center. The number is in the government’s own data. It is not disputed.

Education Reduces Recidivism. It Does Not Reliably Improve Employment.

The evidence base for prison education is real. A 2018 meta-analysis by RAND Corporation researchers, covering 37 years of research and 57 studies, found that incarcerated people who participated in correctional education programs were 28 percent less likely to recidivate than those who did not. That finding held up across the most rigorous study designs in the review. It held across program types: adult basic education, GED preparation, vocational training, and postsecondary college courses all showed meaningful recidivism reductions. The argument for prison education on public safety grounds is well-supported.

The employment finding is a different story. When the same RAND researchers examined post-release employment outcomes across 21 studies, they found that incarcerated people who received correctional education were about 12 percent more likely to find work than those who did not — a positive-looking result. But when they restricted the analysis to the three studies with the highest-quality research designs, the effect disappeared entirely. The odds ratio was 1.27 and not statistically significant. Two of the three strongest studies found no employment effect. The researchers concluded that the apparent employment benefit across all studies was likely driven by selection bias: motivated, work-oriented people choosing to enroll in programs, not the programs themselves creating job outcomes.

This matters in a very specific way for the Ascendium story. Ascendium positions prison education as a pathway to economic mobility, stable employment, and successful community reintegration. That framing is how it justifies grants, shapes policy arguments, and builds its philanthropic brand. The research it relies on — the research it largely funds — supports the recidivism argument strongly. It does not support the economic mobility argument with the same strength. And the debt that funds this education follows people home regardless of whether they find work.

A formerly incarcerated person who completes a college program in prison, is released, cannot find employment because of their record, and then has their wages garnished or their tax refund seized for a student loan they defaulted on before incarceration is not an edge case. It is the structural condition the system creates. Ascendium sits on both sides of that condition: funding the education and holding the debt.

The Barrier: Default as a Gate

Student loan default bars a borrower from federal financial aid eligibility — including Pell Grants. Pell Grants are the primary way most prison education programs get paid for. That connection means default is not just a financial problem for formerly incarcerated people. It is the mechanism that locks them out of the programs designed to help them.

The Student Borrower Protection Center examined loan data from incarcerated students enrolled in Higher Education in Prison programs and found that every single borrower in the study cohort was in default on federal student loans. Every one. The SBPC has characterized near-universal default among incarcerated borrowers as a structural condition, not a behavioral one: incarcerated people enter prison, lose contact with servicers because prison communication restrictions make it nearly impossible to call a loan servicer, earn pennies an hour or nothing at all, and slide into default through structural impossibility. Exiting default while incarcerated requires making nine consecutive monthly payments of at least five dollars — which sounds trivial and is practically impossible when each payment requires routing paperwork through facility bureaucracies that may take longer than a month to process.

The COVID Collections Record

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government ordered guaranty agencies to halt involuntary collections from defaulted borrowers and to begin refunding previously garnished wages. The Student Borrower Protection Center’s analysis of FOIA data showed that Ascendium continued collecting over $3.9 million from defaulted FFELP borrowers in June 2021 — during the period when those collections were explicitly prohibited and refunds were supposed to be underway.

Subsequent SBPC reporting documented that guaranty agencies collectively failed to return over $37 million in garnished wages, and that in the month following the SBPC’s initial report, agencies took another $11 million from defaulted borrowers in continued violation of federal direction. Ascendium was the dominant player in those aggregate figures by virtue of its portfolio size.

While this was happening, Ascendium was also fighting a separate battle in federal court over its right to charge collection fees. In 2019, Ascendium filed suit against the Department of Education challenging a rule that limited collection costs on borrowers who attempted to exit default quickly — within 60 days of their initial default notice. Ascendium’s argument was that it had an unconditional right to charge up to 16 percent of the outstanding loan balance as a collection fee, even when the borrower moved immediately to resolve the default. The D.C. Circuit ruled against Ascendium in 2023. But the litigation record is its own document: an organization that presents as a champion of low-income learners fought in federal court to preserve its ability to charge maximum fees from people trying to get out of debt as fast as possible.

Ascendium Controls the Story

For a nonprofit organization, the ability to shape the information environment around your work is significant. For an organization of Ascendium’s size and position, it is structural. Ascendium has built something that functions like a complete media ecosystem around prison education: funding the reporters, training the trainers, and distributing the findings.

Open Campus receives Ascendium grants and employs the only dedicated prison education beat reporter in the country. The Marshall Project, which covers criminal justice broadly, is Ascendium-funded. The Hechinger Report, which covers education equity including incarcerated learners, is Ascendium-funded. The Education Writers Association, which trains journalists who cover education beats, receives Ascendium grants specifically for workshops on workforce development and prison education reporting. The Associated Press receives Ascendium funding for national education coverage. That is not a list of outlets with incidental Ascendium relationships. That is a funded media infrastructure.

Open Campus discloses the relationship and maintains an editorial independence policy. Disclosure is better than nothing. It does not change the incentive architecture. A journalist covering prison education whose salary depends on Ascendium funding is covering a field where the dominant funder has undisclosed financial interests in the outcome of that coverage. The research showing that prison education improves recidivism — but not reliably employment — does not receive the same prominence in Ascendium-adjacent coverage as the recidivism finding. The debt that bars formerly incarcerated borrowers from the programs the coverage champions is rarely mentioned in the same article as the funder holding that debt.

Who Sits at the Table

Ascendium’s 2024 Form 990 filing documents the board making all of these decisions. It is worth being direct about what that board looks like.

Richard D. George holds four roles simultaneously: chair, president, CIO, and treasurer. That concentration of authority in a single person is unusual in nonprofit governance. George is also the current board chairman of Blumont Inc. — the Madison-based organization that is the renamed successor to International Relief and Development. IRD received more than $2.4 billion from USAID and was suspended by the agency in 2015 for documented financial misconduct: billing the federal government for staff retreats at five-star resorts with open bars, gala dinners, and gift certificates for massages and jewelry; sustaining programs that the USAID Inspector General found failed to match what communities actually needed; and requiring departing employees to sign confidentiality agreements prohibiting critical remarks about the organization to government officials. IRD beat the suspension on a procedural technicality — a court found USAID had a conflict of interest in how it ran the suspension process — and renamed itself Blumont, relocating its headquarters to Madison. George chairs that board. Roger Ervin, a director at Ascendium, served as Blumont’s CEO during the post-suspension restructuring period. The two men who shepherded a rebranded organization with a documented federal misconduct history now govern the country’s largest student loan guarantor.

Scott Klug is an active Washington lobbyist, not a former one. He is co-chair of the Federal Public Affairs Practice at Foley and Lardner, where his listed areas of expertise are education, health care, and financial services — the three domains Ascendium operates in. His lobbying clients pay him to shape policy in the same regulatory environment that governs his fellow board members’ organization. Two other board members are retired Foley and Lardner partners. A former Wisconsin Democratic governor who appointed a current Ascendium board member to the state’s Department of Revenue is of counsel at the same firm. By a conservative count, five of the twelve board seats have direct Foley and Lardner connections.

Emerson Brumback, vice chair, is the retired president and COO of M&T Bank during the period when M&T agreed to pay $64 million to settle federal allegations that it knowingly originated and certified FHA mortgage loans that did not meet underwriting requirements, then built a quality control system designed to generate artificially low error rates to conceal the problem. The settlement covered loans made between 2006 and 2011 — the height of the subprime crisis, when FHA loans were being extended into communities of color as predatory instruments. Brumback ran operations at M&T during most of that period. Darren King, also a director, is currently a senior executive vice president at the same institution.

The board does not include justice-impacted people, formerly incarcerated advocates, frontline prison educators, or representatives of borrower communities. It includes banking executives, lobbyists, and the leadership of an organization with a documented federal suspension history. That is who decides which prison education programs get funded, which researchers get grants, and which journalists get support.

The Honest Frame

Ascendium is not a cartoon villain. The staff working on prison education grantmaking are doing real work that matters. The programs they fund are real. The recidivism data is real. Prison education is worth fighting for — every year a person is educated rather than returned to prison is a year of harm that does not happen. None of that is in dispute.

But the research is also telling us something the field has been slow to say plainly: education is the necessary first step, not the complete answer. The 2018 RAND meta-analysis showed a robust 28% reduction in recidivism. It also showed that the employment effect — the part that connects education to economic survival on the outside — disappears when you look only at the strongest studies. That is not an argument against prison education. It is an argument that education without a functioning job market on the other end leaves people with credentials they cannot use, debt they cannot repay, and wages that can be garnished for loans they took out before they ever went to prison.

The credential gets you to the door. The hiring discrimination closes it. Ban-the-box laws exist in 37 states and the District of Columbia but cover varying employer categories, leave wide exemptions, and are inconsistently enforced. Most private employers conduct background checks and most return a record. The diploma that a person earned behind bars does not override that result in most hiring conversations. Vocational training produces a certified skill set that goes unused when the license exam board or the trade association bars applicants with felony records. The education investment — real as it is — runs directly into a labor market that has not been restructured to receive it.

Second Chance Hiring refers to intentional employer commitment to fairly consider qualified applicants with criminal records. Some of the country’s largest employers have made those commitments — JPMorgan Chase, Walmart — under varying degrees of public pressure and voluntary initiative. Federal contractors are subject to fair chance requirements under the Fair Chance to Compete for Jobs Act of 2019. The infrastructure for expanding these standards exists. What is largely missing is the organized advocacy pressure to extend them even further: moving into more industries, with stronger enforcement, with specific protections for people who completed education programs while incarcerated.

An organization with Ascendium’s lobbying infrastructure and policy reach could be a significant force for that kind of expansion. It is not doing that. It is funding prison education programs, funding the journalism that covers those programs, and collecting on the debt that bars the people in those programs from enrollment — while the labor market those people graduate into remains structurally hostile to hiring them.

What is also real: the research Ascendium funds and promotes shows that prison education reduces recidivism but does not reliably improve post-release employment. The board making all of these decisions is drawn from institutions with documented records of financial misconduct, predatory lending, and regulatory evasion. The journalists most capable of reporting that connection receive Ascendium funding. For anyone working in prison education, incarcerated learner advocacy, or justice-adjacent philanthropy, the question is whether any of this is visible enough to name, and whether naming it costs you your program’s funding. That question is itself a feature of the system, not a bug. Institutions consolidate power by making dissent expensive. Ascendium has done this with unusual thoroughness.