Hey everyone. Kim Kardashian here. SO this week I’m writing about student loans and I really feel like I should say I definitely needed help reading about this…and reading in general.
So apparently on July 1st this summer some really weird sh*t went down in Congress, because all of a sudden student loan interest rates doubled from 3.4% to 6.8% for undergrads, and I was like “Aren’t students already, like, a trillion dollars in debt?†Obviously I was totally right, students nationwide are a trillion dollars in debt and counting.
So then I guess the Democrats and the Republicans decided to stop fighting for five seconds, and they actually passed a new bill. It’s got a really long name like the Bipartisan Student Loan Certainty Act, or something. It’s supposed to fix a bunch of things from the Higher Education Act of 1965. Anyway it cut the rates of undergrad loans to 3.9% and also the rates of grad students to 5.4% and parents to 6.4%. This is really awesome because they fixed those rates for a lifetime so you don’t have to change the amount you’re paying year after year. I was, like, super proud when I found out they agreed on something that doesn’t suck.
But then they did something totally uncool. They decided to make those interest rates dependent on the state of the market. So if I take out a loan today (lol), because the economy is still bombing I won’t have to pay as much as someone who takes one out when the economy stops sucking, which is literally supposed to happen in 2015. That means the loans will get harder and harder to pay off for each new class of students because the interest rate will keep increasing, which I guess means we’ll all have to become Zuckerbergs and Gates because college will get crazy expensive. The better the market gets, the higher the interest rate gets, and everything’s thrown out of whack because we had a loser economy for so long.
Thank God at least somebody else thought of this in Congress, because they decided that no matter what, even if America’s economy becomes as rich as me, the rates won’t go above a certain percent. For undergrads that’s 8.25%, for grads that’s 9.5%, and for parents that’s 10.5%. Still, that’s like majorly high. Remember how mad everyone was when the rate jumped to 6.8%? I guess the bright side is that they’re not done “fixing†things yet. Congress is supposed to redo the whole 1965 Higher Education Act, and, like, it’s about time. That bill is almost 50 years old, which is way too old to still be telling people what to do. (Ew, imagine being 50).
I guess the important thing to know is that the student interest rates are the coolest things ever right now. They’re so great that I’m, like, definitely thinking of going back to college. I could totally use a break after all this writing, and college parties are like, the best.  Bye you guys, find me on Twitter!
