Improving loan systems for students should be priority
By Jennifer Mishory
April 15, 2007 9:48 p.m.
Enrolling in the correct coursework, taking the right tests, getting the grades, submitting the applications, and deciding which school to attend are all a part of the process.
And then for millions of high school seniors, the college admissions process isn’t over ““ there are more forms to fill out and the burden of thousands of dollars of debt to take on. To complicate matters, it has become clear that when millions of 17-year-old kids reach this stretch of the process, many receive less-than-transparent information.
Discovery of scandal within the $85 billion student loan industry continues. Perks from loan companies to college employees, including all-expense paid trips, stock sales and gifts in exchange for recommendations of lenders to students, have recently been revealed.
Applying for student loans for graduate schools is a daunting task that I will face in the next few weeks.
Choosing a lender and deciding which repayment incentives are most beneficial are just the beginnings of my confusion. I can’t imagine facing this as a high school senior. But the complications students face in financing higher education extend beyond the unethical activities that have come to light in the past weeks. They involve both government and private loans, high interest rates and government subsidies.
UCLA undergraduates may rely less on commercial loans simply because public school fees are lower.
Westen Newman, a second-year psychology student, has a variety of public loans and financial aid.
Newman received financial aid through his father’s veteran status, a Pell Grant, a University Grant and a Stafford loan, and did not have trouble dealing with the application process. “They give you all the information once you get them,” Newman said, adding that the process was relatively easy.
But government loans could do a lot more to facilitate a high school student’s ease in attending college.
Even if some students have found loans are easy to obtain, they certainly won’t be so easy to pay back.
“Student loan debt in general … affects everything from what career we choose, to when we choose to start a family,” said Sarah Dobjensky, coordinator of the Higher Education Campaign at CALPIRG. Dobjensky is part of a Student Debt Relief campaign that has lobbied for decreases in government subsidies to banks, increases in Pell Grant awards and cuts in the interest rates for government loans.
In January, the House voted to cut student loan interest rates in half. The Senate version of the bill is currently being reviewed in the Committee on Finance. And hopefully, the recent revelations will help to shed some light for those relying on private loans.
In response to the controversial relationships between private lenders and universities, a bill was proposed that would prohibit gifts over $10 and lenders from offering services, and would ensure transparency in special arrangements, according to a press release from Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., the sponsor of the bill.
Making education a priority and college affordable is a goal that is practically universal in the world of politics, where few concepts make it across the partisan divide. If that’s the case, we should do a better job at making that goal a reality by improving both the public and private loan systems.
E-mail Mishory at [email protected].
