Breaking News: College Loan Reform

With President Obama signing the last of the healthcare fixes into law, healthcare is not the only thing is going to chang ein the United States. What also changes with the signing of this bill is the college loan system.

From the Associated Press:

"Under the measure, private banks would no longer get fees for acting as middlemen in federal student loans. The government would use the savings to boost Pell Grants and make it easier for some workers to repay their student loans. 

In addition, some borrowers could see lower interest rates and higher approval rates on student loans.

Obama has touted the changes as a way to make college more affordable for students and their debt load more manageable after graduation. He used his weekend radio and Internet address to cite expected benefits for young people: more student lending, caps on those repayments and more money for minority colleges and universities.

"This reform of the federal student loan programs will save taxpayers $68 billion over the next decade," Obama said in his weekly address. "And with this legislation, we're putting that money to use achieving a goal I set for America: By the end of this decade, we will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world."

For many of my friends who are college students, especially those who are at Northwestern and peer institutions, where tuition hovers close to 40,000 dollars per year, this is big news. With the removal of the middleman system in college lending, we can only hope that college students will be in a more advantageous position when they come out of college and enter a turbulent economy.

-Sahil