There is a dark financial cloud looming on the horizon for future and past college graduates alike, and the current proposals to solve the expense of higher education are not enough.

According to the White House’s College Scorecard, the median Syracuse University student borrows $24,300 in loans.

Every year, voices of despair fill the quad as students gather to lament that tuition has once again increased, but financial aid has either decreased or remained stagnated. This trend is by no means isolated in SU.

With the national aggregate total of college related debt set to exceed 1 trillion in the near future, many people are understandably riding on the hope that the Obama administration will do something —anything— about that ever growing bubble of college loans.

Probable solutions have been proposed.

There are pending legislative proposals that are moving toward completely eliminating debt after 10 or 20 years for public and private sectors respectively. A borrower pays 10 percent of their income up to 20 years, and “poof,” a fairy godmother almost wipes it away.

Respectfully, this strategy scares me. The potential for student borrower abuse is tremendous. Imagine knowing that regardless of the amount of money you borrow, you’d never have to pay more than 10 percent of whatever you made in the future.

When choosing between $30,000 of debt versus $100,000 of debt, the larger number provides just a few more years of minimal payments.

However, tidal waves of misinformation have spread about how to alleviate the issue. One such piece of information is that by the end of the year, all student debt will be wiped out. There is an infinite amount of sarcastic comments I could make in relation to this news.

Simply stated, as much as we wish it were true, a widespread complete and immediate elimination of student debt is completely false.

Life happens. Age 18 isn’t the best time to decide whether you can take on tens of thousands of dollars in borrowings. People entering college may be responsible for financially contributing back home. So many different factors make saying “yes” easy.

But I still think that just a simple dissolution is dangerous. We should work to make the borrowing process more transparent. Seriously, educating people before allowing them to sign their lives away would be a more productive use of the governmental funds.

A few months before my freshman year of college, I followed a thought process as I signed my loan agreements.

The thought process was pretty simple.

Do I need college? Yes.
Do I need money? Yes.
Do I need to sign this to get money? Yes.

So sign away and deal with everything else later. My current knowledge about what was really going on came much later.

Now, my thought process is a bit different and it goes as follows:

Do people need college? No. College guarantees nothing. There are trade, technical schools or alternatives such as going to a community college and transferring. The caveat is that college makes things a lot easier.

Do people need money? Yes. But, “how much is appropriate?” is a much better question. If you want to be a painter – I love painters – it’s not recommended that you take out $150,000 of debt.

Do people need to sign only loan papers to get money? No. There are scholarships and grants still available. Contact the Office of Financial Aid to get on their email list. Pay attention to what your individual college offers. Utilize the Internet and talk to your teachers. For SU students with private loans, there is the I Otto Know This! program. For those who have private loans outside of SU, see if there is room for negotiation on rates. Then finally there is the good old-fashioned job.

Yes, none of this is glamorous.

But we need to start taking the first steps to brightening the horizon ourselves.

Fran Walker is a senior finance and accounting major. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at fwalke01@syr.edu.

Published on August 26, 2013 at 1:25 am