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Monday, October 26, 2015

Our College Bound kids have one less student loan to choose from, thanks to Dumb Ron Johnson; the Perkins Loan Program.

College students and their parents have just lost a huge student loan option, thanks to Republican senators who don’t like how complicated the whole process is. So too bad about the Perkins loan program.

But that’s been their plan all along; offer nothing to replace what they don't like.

We've seen this with the Affordable Care Act. Republican would kill it in an instant without a replacement or transitional plan. The same is true for student loans. They want to streamline the student loan programs, but they don’t have a way to do that. WPR:
Dead!
This week the U.S. Senate rejected an effort to extend an expired student loan program which helped nearly 16,000 University of Wisconsin students in the last school year. The Federal Perkins Loan Program — designed to make universities to have more "skin in the game" by matching a portion of student loans — expired at the end of September. Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin tried unsuccessfully to get colleagues to extend it for a year. She said that the program, administered by the schools, has been self-sustaining since 2004. "They're revolving funds which means as a student pays back his or her Perkins loans, they're loaned out to other students," Baldwin said. "So it's a great program."
That’s right, the loan program was self-sustaining, adding nothing to the countries debt. But Dumb Ron Johnson didn’t like having the government guarantee the $1 trillion program anyway. Done:
Republicans want to streamline the government's various loan programs … the Federal Perkins Loan Program serves nearly 1 in 11 students in the UW System … they administered nearly $29 million to roughly 16,000 students in 2013-14.
Well, not anymore.

But how do conservatives reconcile making it harder to get student loans? This comment followed the story:
Rather than empowering college students to be more and more in debt when they graduate we need to bring the costs of a college education down. We need to get away from the mentality that every student needs a college education. 
No one said "every student," did they? But what about the students who actually need a college education who are left out now due the loss of the Perkins loan program? Another person answered with this:
You are correct, people without degrees are cheaper for employers. Maybe we should eliminate colleges all together.
 Words like "steam-line," and "simplifying" is code for eliminate, not replace. Pretty simple. 


1 comment:

  1. Considering how bad the whole student loan situation really is, removing a education financing option like this really isn't going to be good news. I don't think the situation is going to improve at all at this rate!

    ReplyDelete