Obama's student loan executive order savings: $10 a month on average Rick Moran
Obama's executive fiats dealing with the student loan problem turns out to be window dressing - and bad window dressing at that.
The Atlantic:
The first would clearly be the most significant, because it is aimed at helping more student loan borrowers. How much would an interest rate reduction of up to 0.5% affect payments?
For the average borrower, the impact would be small. In 2011, Bachelor's degree recipients graduating with debt had an average balance of $27,204, according to an analysis done by finaid.org, based on Department of Education data. That average has ballooned from just $17,646 over the past decade.
Using these values as the high and low bounds of average student debt over the last ten years, the monthly savings for the average student loan borrower would be between $4.50 and $7.75 per month. Clearly, this isn't going to save the economy. While borrowers with bigger balances would save more, this is the average. And even someone with $100,000 in loans would only cut their monthly payments by $28.50.
Payment Limits
As mentioned, the government already has a program for borrowers to reduce their student loan payments to a ceiling of 15% of their income. At this time, just 450,000 borrowers are participating. Clearly, all of those participants would benefit from lowering the max payment to 10%. But how many others would?*
Student loan balances have really only ballooned over the past decade. So this change would affect very few Americans over the age of 32. For the young adults who it may effect, we must remember that educational attainment has some correlation to income. Those with the most debt will have attended business school, medical school, or law school. Most of those people will also have higher incomes, making them ineligible.
The costs of higher education are growing so fast, along with student loans to pay for it, that the bubble is going to burst eventually. This will happen when cheaper, alternative educational opportunities are seen as a substitute to the "college experience" and massive numbers of college age kids simply refuse to play the higher education game anymore.
Bailouts on the horizon?
Poster Comment:
$5 says the MSM won't touch this story with a 10 foot pole......
