Student Repayment for Loans

Offers for loans for students seem to flood aid-seekers fields of vision when they are considering their options for education; however, student repayment for loans unfortunately is not what they are thinking about at this particular moment.

In fact, plans for repayment, let alone what is likely to happen with these loans’ interest rates is rarely discussed in these offers. What is emphasized is the angle of “You can do it! You can get an education! Just sign here and it’s all going to be magically possible!”

This strategy preys upon the American dream where an individual who doesn’t come from a lot of money can go to school and get a great job and become successful. Unfortunately, this dream conveniently omits the part about how you are going to get the money for school.

Private companies offering these loans to students who are often ignorant to what they are going to have to do in order to pay these loans off are taking advantage of young people’s tendency to “live in the now”: this encompasses their impulsiveness as well as their feelings of invincibility—“I’ll be fine! I’m not worried about what’s going to happen to me in 20 years—this is what I want to do right now and that’s what counts!”

Young people aren’t going to take more responsibility for their actions on their own. Someone needs to be there to tell them that these loans they are taking out now are going to haunt them for a good number of years later on, and that they should give more weighty consideration to staying in-state, going to a community college and transferring to a 4-year university later on, or looking for programs that offer work-study positions and assistantships.

Or, though this may seem drastic, someone might want to encourage the student to take a hard look at what, specifically, they think an undergraduate (or graduate) degree will help them accomplish. I know too many individuals in their late twenties currently holding jobs that had nothing to do with their undergraduate or graduate degrees or even the prestige of the school(s) they went to.

I know that there is a lot of pressure right now among high school students to go to the most prestigious school they can get into, but I think that perhaps some real-world advice from an unemployed twenty-something with $40,000 worth of loans to pay off could possibly do them some good.

Student repayment for loans is not something that should be taken lightly by students, and I feel that a change in the way students are informed about the post-high school educational process could help make a dent in the credit and debt crises of the future of the American economy.