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Fox
8 Cleveland
Students
React to Loan Interest
Rates Doubling
by Dave Nethers
July 1, 2013
AKRON–
Interest rates on unsecured
federal student loans doubled from 3.4% to 6.8% on Monday after
Congress took a
4th of July break without the Senate voting on a related bill that
would keep
them lower.
The
news concerned many students at
the University of Akron, where roughly 75% of the students receive some
kind of
federal aid to pay for their education.
“I
really have to look at the
reflection at the end of the tunnel because the debt that I am going to
accumulate over the years, it’s astronomical,” said Cody Moore, a
nursing
student.
“It
scares me because that means I
am going to have to pay double what I am already paying after I
graduate and I
haven’t started paying my loans back yet; so the price is going to be
way
higher,” said Kayla Puz, who is in between her junior and senior year.
By
one calculation, the increased
interest rate could cost the average student as much as $2,600 more.
Congressman
Jim Renacci of
Wadsworth said he voted for the bill, which he said ties student loans
to
market rates and has measures that protect the most vulnerable, before
it
stalled in the Senate.
“We
are all back on Monday next
week and at that time the Senate can act,” Renacci told FOX 8 News on
Monday.
“They
can take our bill, hopefully
make it retroactive to July first. We’d be willing to work with them on
that
and hopefully we can have a solution early next week,” said Renacci.
In
the meantime, students who rely
on federal loans are already trying to calculate what it will cost them
when
they have to pay them back…
Read
the rest of the article at Fox
8 Cleveland
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