Students in college or starting next fall got some good news from the federal government. The interest rate on student loans is going down to 3.76 percent.
Sen. Angus King says it’s because of a bipartisan change he helped broker in 2013 to peg student loan rates to what it costs the federal government to borrow money.
“The lowest it has been in a decade and considerably below, almost half of what it would have been if we had not come to that solution,” he says.
King says Congress still needs to address other parts of the student loan problem. He says too many students still go too far into debt for their college education.
He says Congress should consider changing the way loans are paid back to take into account the income of the person as they start their work career so they would start out with lower payments.
“An earnings based repayment schedule so that students don’t exit college with this enormous burden,” he says. “One student told me, ‘Senator, I feel like I have a mortgage but no house.’“
