Editorial:
Putting students deeper in debt

There is no way President Bush can be living in the same reality as the rest of us. If he were, he’d be able to understand the consequences of the vicious cycle he’s perpetuating with the preposterous budget-cutting bill he approved last week.

Mark your calendars, everyone, because you’re all going to want to remember Feb. 8, 2006. It’s the day that college students everywhere got pretty nicely screwed.

It’s bad enough that the average college student owes between $17,000 and $20,000 in loans by the time graduation rolls around, and the average Rider student owes more than $30,000 in loans when he or she receives that coveted diploma. But now, thanks to the ingenious bill that will result in a $12.7 billion cut in federal student loans and a significant rise in interest rates, students will have an even harder time both affording tuition payments and paying off the loans they’ve accrued during their college careers.

President Bush was apparently thrilled when the House passed this law by a scant two-vote victory. It seems as though the money the government will save by making college more of a financial burden — thus denying many potential college students the education that would have been supremely beneficial in making their futures a little brighter — will go to paying off the growing federal deficit, funding the Iraq War and repairing the damage from Hurricane Katrina.

Okay, so funding the post-hurricane recovery efforts is a worthy cause, and the Iraqi population deserves freedom just as much as the citizens of any other country do. But what about the future of America’s students? Is it fair to deny a financially strapped high schooler the chance to receive the very college education and life experience that may help him transcend his humble and seemingly hopeless beginnings? Is it fair to leave recent graduates even deeper in debt after dumping them into the real world? Many of us aren’t heading right from the commencement ceremony to a lofty job that will magically make our student loans disappear within a matter of months, so we ought to be a little concerned about this bill’s ramifications.

The rising interest rates of student loans will supposedly stay at fixed rates, no longer fluctuating based on that year’s market value, and a very meager portion — about $3.75 billion — of the money saved by this new bill will be funding a program that will offer grants to a very select group of students. This latter point, unfortunately, is utterly useless to the vast majority of students. And even the varying interest rates we are used to have not been even remotely close to this new fixed figure.

Rider’s SGA has taken the first step in opposing the increasing interest rates, and we should all support this movement in every way possible. We’ve all gained an invaluable experience because of what we’ve learned both in the classroom and from college life in general. It’s unfair to deny both the younger members of our generation and future college-aged students the chance to work toward a four-year degree that is an increasingly more important first step toward a successful future, while leaving current students with a debt they never anticipated.