great lake student loan
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Student loan increases met with concerns
On Tuesday, students gathered in the Ohio Union to talk about the Federal Loan programs with Franklin County Commissioner Mary Jo Kilroy. With more than 311,000 borrowers in the state of Ohio, this topic has become a huge concern for both students and the government.
This roundtable discussion was an opportunity for students to voice their concerns about how changes to the loan program have affected them and also to discuss what can be done to make higher education more affordable.
As part of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, which President Bush signed into law this past February, interest rates for a variable rate Stafford Loan will increase from 5.29 percent to 7.14 percent and Parent Loan for Undergraduates (PLUS) will increase from 6.09 percent to 7.94 percent, according to the Great Lakes Loan Association in Madison, Wisc.
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Officials deny petition for simpler student loans
The U.S. Department of Education has declined to implement a recommendation by student groups and lenders to simplify its regulations on student loans and make them more fair.
"We regulate only if absolutely necessary and then in the most flexible, most equitable and least burdensome way possible," the department wrote in a letter to the petitioners June 5. The letter stated the process proposed in the petition was not consistent with those principles.
The petitioners were led by the Project on Student Debt, which conducted a poll in March that found that 64 percent of adults said the federal government was not doing enough to make higher education available to people of all backgrounds. Other petitioners included the College Board, American Student Assistance, Public Interest Research Groups, Great Lakes Higher Education Guaranty Corp., the United States Student Association, College Parents of America, the Council for Opportunity in Education and the Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society.