Thousands of dollars in debt: What do students do about it?
Student Loan Problems in Ohio from KentWired.com on Vimeo.
By: Paige Katrinchak, Dana Miller and Skye McEowen
Students across the nation, for a majority, face a common problem at some point during their college career: debt from loans.
Ohio is said to have the average debt of $28,146 from college. The national average is almost $3,000 less, according to the Institute for College Access and Success.
Cleveland ranked third in a 2016 Business Insider list of 10 cities where college graduates ended up owing more money than they pulled in.
Mark Evans, director of student financial aid at Kent State, said more than 90 percent of the incoming freshman class receives some form of financial aid. This includes scholarship and grants on student employment, to name a few.
For Sarah Matthews, a Kent State senior public relations major, she is among the 90 percent of Kent students that received a form of financial aid and the 65 percent who walk away with needing to pay back loans.
She said that once she started looking for colleges, she immediately knew that money would be an issue.
Matthews said she currently works at an on-campus job among taking a full class load, just so she can save up money to help pay off the upwards of $50,000 in debt she will owe by the time of graduation.
“It’s terrifying,” she said. “If I think about it too much, it literally keeps me up at night. The thought of having to pay off all that money is really stressful.”
Since her amount of debt is closer to double the average amount of student debt in Ohio, she has already started paying them off while in school. As of right now, that just consists of paying the interest off.
“It’s funny because it’s not even going towards the actual loan,” she said. “It’s going towards the interest of my loan, which most people don’t think about.”
Though Matthews earned scholarship money, she said it did not cover the entire cost of tuition, or for her room in board. This lead her to need a loan through FASFA and separate bank loans.
However, Matthews felt her high school didn’t give any guidance in the process of loans. She and her mother were the primary ones figuring it out.
“I knew nothing about this leaving high school and going to college,” Matthews said. “I felt like I wasn’t really informed on the whole process.”
While Matthews said she has her own personal plan to rid the loans, she was not aware of any sort of counseling or workshops through Kent State that would help educate on loans, or the explain the best practices in paying them off.
“Unfortunately many students don’t have financial literacy training so they are not in a very good position to make informed decisions about the trade-offs between different types of loans,” said Mark Kantrowitz, President of MK Counseling.
Randi Brown, a financial aid coordinator with Kent State, said the first form of education normally received about loans is through entrance counseling offered at Destination Kent State, a first-year student orientation program with an advisor.
Evans also said that through DKS, there is a two day event that students can participate in for learning about financial aid.
“We do a presentation that walks them through what the next steps are in terms of reviewing their financial aid offer, and making decisions (for) a subsidized loan, unsubsidized loan, in terms of the differences,” Evans said.
Though Matthews plans to finish her degree, Kantrowitz said that students who do drop-out, are “four times more likely to default on their student loans than students who graduate.”
Those students represent the 63 percent who default on loans, Kantrowitz said.
MK Counseling serves to aid others in a variety of technical services, including student loans. Kantrowitz himself has researched and written about student financial aid. Kantrowitz said students may not have even been in debt before, and end up having to pay more than they thought originally because of interest rates.
While loans and loan education can be daunting for students, there are options available to alleviate the burden of student debt, as well as actions planned to make college as financially painless as possible.
In 2015, Governor John Kasich created the Task Force on Affordability and Efficiency. According to the Ohio Department of Higher Education, the task force is, “to review and recommend ways in which state-sponsored institutions of higher education and two-year community and two-year community colleges, can be more efficient, offering an education of equal or higher quality while at the same time decreasing their costs.”
The Ohio Department of Higher Education chancellor John Carey said as a parent, he is interested in the task force.
“It’s a big issue and I don’t pretend that we’ve solved it,” Carey said. “it’s something that the governor and the legislature are interested in.”
Carey added that while things can be done at the state, government and university level, it’s important for the student to understand the consequence and circumstances when they take on debt.
“There are times when it makes sense to borrow, but at the same time you don’t want to borrow money without understanding how you are going to pay it back in the future,” Carey said.
Carey suggested the idea that reducing the amount of time it takes to earn a degree, will in return save money.
To do so, Carey said the department is working with community colleges to obtain more “two plus two” agreements, where a university will partner with a community college and allow the student to take prerequisite courses, then transfer to a university with course credit.
Stark State College works closely with Kent State to do this, Carey said.
“You can go get your basic courses at the community college and then transfer those to either the regional campus or to the main campus at Kent State as a way to save money,” Carey said. “We’re also giving students the opportunity to take college courses while they are in high school.”
Carey said a strategy that they have implemented with the governor and legislature is a plan for reducing the need for student loans on the front-end.
“Ohio is one of the top states in the nation for holding down the cost of tuition, it’s been frozen for some time now,” Carey said. “The resources that we receive in the state of Ohio for higher education, we’ve invested in state share of instruction in order to keep tuition down as well.
Kantrowitz, said the best way for students to pay off loans efficiently is to have their starting salary exceed the amount they owe in student loans.
“If your total debt exceeds your annual income you will struggle to make those loan payments and you will end up in an alternate repayment plan,” Kantrowitz said.
Brown said when students are approaching graduation, the financial aid office offers exit counseling appointments and advanced loan counseling appointments.
“We’ll sit down with you, go over what you’ve borrowed total, the interest that accrued on those loans… We have have a great repayment estimator, that walk through the students to determine what type of repayments you’ll be looking at,” Brown said.
As it seems there are options offered — but not mandatory — out there for assistance with loan education, Matthews said she wishes that she would have learned the basics before entering college, such as how to file a tax return. Things that are expected to know once thrusted into adulthood.
“That would have better set me up coming into college,” she said.
Ohio has an average student loan debt of nearly $28,000. What are some ways to manage your debt? https://t.co/VbZlUpHBB9 #JMCRPP
— Skye (@skye_mceowen) October 5, 2016
Students acquire thousands of dollars in loans, “It literally keeps me up at night” -:https://t.co/NsZxnNGn6f #JMCRPP
— Dana Miller (@danamillerKSU) October 5, 2016
Student loan debt is a problem facing students everywhere. So how are Ohio colleges helping students deal with loans? #JMCRPP
— Paige Katrinchak (@pkatrinchak) October 5, 2016
Helpful Links:
http://ticas.org/content/posd/top-10-student-loan-tips-recent-graduates