Matt Bowman Source 4

Are there known implications to my current findings?

Exit Counseling Guide for Federal Student Loan Borrowers. Federal Student Aid, US Department of Education. P.O. Box 1398, Jessup, MD 20794-1398, 2010. ProQuest. Web. 7 Mar. 2016.

In the same way that car loans and home mortgages must be repaid, student loans are borrowed money that must be repaid, with interest. Student loans cannot be canceled if a student is unsatisfied with the education they received, cannot land a job in the field they studied for or are experiencing financial hardship. Loans are lawful responsibilities that students must fully commit to. Exit counseling, of which this article addresses, is required before withdraw, graduation, or dropping below half-time attendance. It helps students fully grasp their rights and duties as a debtor of student loans. It also delivers valuable tips to help students better manage their finances. This federally administered guide offers material on taking out loans, repaying loans, what to do if payments become troublesome, and discharge and forgiveness information. Also included are a Borrower's Rights and Responsibilities form and a Student Contact Information form.

This source doesn’t answer the research question I held in finding it. However, it ties back to my point about furthering the education of student loans and debt for those involved. It does so by straightforwardly laying out every detail its creators think might be of importance for debtors. I found it very interesting that I hadn’t come across this yet. Throughout all the research I’ve done, even parsing through articles stating we need more education on the topic, I had not seen that there is, at least, this federally administered document (I assume there are probably others as well) that can educate students fairly deeply. This is exactly the type of thing I imagined when I praised the idea of broader loan education. Since this source remained fairly invisible to me, it is probable that it did so to many others inquiring about the topic as well. This leads me to slightly rethink my proposition of furthering education. Rather than stressing the basic need for it, I know think there needs to simply be an emphasis put on shedding light on the current education. Students need help learning how to complete many things, loans included, that’s why they are students and not teachers. Many aren’t aware of aids that could help them understand their debt better. By enlarging the emphasis on tools like this document to even bigger aids like counseling itself or classes on loans, I think the problems that occur when students go to pay their debt would decrease quite drastically. I previously thought we needed light emphasis on education of current policies and heavy emphasis on new policies. Now, I am starting to think we could fix a lot with heavy emphasis on education of current policies, negating some of the need for a huge overhaul of our system of higher education as it pertains to student costs and debts.

This text converses nicely with my first source because they both pertain to educating students on loans. My first article declared that there is a terrible problem and that students are horribly unaware of the details of their debts. I agree with the information it lays out. This source responds, in a way, to that by offering detailed educational information on many important details about student loans. It is a direct answer to the first’s “need” in that it provides the “solution” for a lack of information available to students. By reading these articles, I can now see that they both hold merit and an overall solution may lie somewhere in the middle. The first essentially cries that there is hardly enough information widely distributed, the second offers what education students need, and my solution is that education needs to be met in a compromise. Debtors need to be encouraged to seek out details more (that is difficult to propose as a solution since all people will do hat they please) and what information exists needs to be more widely distributed and possibly be made a requirement to learn.

I am now led to search backwards for answers on if our current system would be fine if more people just got more involved. In this, I mean that I have been being led to search for an overhaul of our system of higher education but I am now questioning if that is needed. My research doesn’t directly lead me to this but I am inquisitively thinking and now wonder if the faults in the system aren’t entirely in its makeup but in a lack of efficient control by those involved in it.