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Student Loans Are A Burden But It’s The Lack of Jobs That Hurts America More
By Senator Marco Rubio
FoxNews.com
May 8, 2012
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/05/08/student-loans-are-burden-but-it-lack-jobs-that-hurts-america-more/
This week, Washington will shift its attention to the issue of student loans. Unless Congress acts, interest rates on new subsidized Stafford college loans will soon double from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent.
Fortunately, there is a solution to this, but its primary obstacle will be election year politics. The issue will test President Obama and how badly he wants to exploit rising student loan debt for his own political gain.
Congress should prevent the loan rate hike and pay for it by targeting the very root of this increase – a provision in the 2010 federal health care law that raids student aid to the tune of $9 billion in order to “pay for” other parts of ObamaCare. Since this problem is of President Obama’s own making, we should clean up this latest ObamaCare mess by ending this slush fund and applying the savings to prevent the upcoming rate increase.
For me, the issue of student loans is one that I am intimately familiar with. In fact, I was only able to afford college because of student loan and grant programs.
After high school, I attended Tarkio College in Missouri to play football. Since my parents could not afford to help me financially, the school put together a financial aid package that allowed me to pursue my dreams of going to college and playing football.
After one season, I moved back to Florida and dedicated myself more to my studies, first at community college, then the University of Florida and finally the University of Miami’s law school. Throughout this time, I relied on student loans, grants and hard work.
These experiences taught me about the challenges students face in making ends meet in college, and later on as graduates trying to pay off their student loans.
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