Should the US Reform the Student Loan System?

Guest post by Contributing Editor, Matthew Amster-Burton,



But many of the benefits of a college education—such as higher earnings and the opportunity to spend four years having inebriated pseudo-intellectual conversations with your peers—accrue to the student. So students and their families should pay something, and providing a traditional four-year degree is not cheap.

Perhaps in the future, online degrees from something like Khan Academy or iTunes U will be as sought after as Harvard diplomas. In the meantime, college costs real money—and even if online degrees become standard, there’s always the opportunity cost.

If you’re watching lectures and taking tests, that’s time away from earning a paycheck. I’m optimistic about the potential of electronic courses, but they’re not going to cram a four-year degree into one year — except for rare hotshots.

While I’m sympathetic to the idea that college should be as free as public high school, the idea is politically untenable and, let’s be honest, would lead to a lot of aimless hacky-sacking.

But there is one reform well within reach that would make financial life easier and more predictable for college graduates: perhaps we should make our student loan system more Australian.

From a Land Down Under

The Australian university financing system is complicated and includes controls on tuition rates, but the key provision that the US could easily adopt is to make student loan repayment part of the tax code.

Here’s how it works. Once you graduate from college in Australia and get a job, you begin repaying your student loan via paycheck withholding, exactly the same way you pay your income taxes.

The repayment scheme is highly progressive: if you make less than about $45,000, you owe nothing on your student loans. Make between $45,000 and $50,000 and you’ll pay 4% of your income. Make over $91,000 and you’ll pay 8%.

The repayment amount is tied to your income, not the amount of your loans. You can pay extra on your loans at any time, and you receive a bonus for doing so. Once your loans are repaid, the paycheck deduction automatically stops and your paycheck gets fatter.

This is similar to the Income-Based Repayment (IBR) plan available to federal student loan borrowers in the US. The key differences are:

  • IBR is available only when you have a financial hardship. The Australian system is for everyone.
  • IBR still relies on voluntary repayment.

The last point is key. We may not like it, but most of us faithfully pay our taxes on time because the IRS makes it easy. If we had to send them a check every month or every April, the rate of tax evasion and underpayment would jump enormously.

Self-employed people are responsible for withholding their own taxes and paying them quarterly, and tax problems are extremely common among freelancers. W-2 employees hardly notice that they’re paying taxes. (I once asked my brother how much tax he paid, and he said, “Zero.” He meant that’s how much he owed in April.)

Yes, you can and should set up automatic payments for your student loans, but it’s still not the same. You’ll get into trouble when you change jobs or change banks.

This is one instance where it’s to your benefit to have the government’s hooks in you: since your student loan payments are going to the government, and you’re punished harshly for failing to pay, why don’t they make it easy?


One more thing

True, not all student loan payments are owed to Uncle Sam. But private student loans account for less than 10% of student loan originations, and they’re among the worst kind of debt: high interest, ineligible for IBR, and still not dischargeable in bankruptcy.


What I’m talking about here is a small reform. It won’t solve the problems of students taking on too much student debt or attending colleges they can’t afford.

But it would meaningfully improve the lives of many people facing down student loans, at a minimal cost to the government, and it’s not a new idea: it’s been tested in the sun-baked laboratory called Australia.




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8 thoughts on “Should the US Reform the Student Loan System?

  1. Auros

    I’ve seen other people advocate a progressive-tax-rate style student loan system (something of the form “pay 1% of gross income over $40k and 2% of gross income over $250k for twenty years”), either actually in the tax code, or even just financed by university endowments (like a lot of current financial aid) but administered through payroll deductions (similar to child support). One of the advantages, it seems to me, is that it should encourage entrepreneurialism. If you graduate from college with a load of debt, you need to find steady work immediately — you can’t take a couple years trying to commercialize that cool idea you and your buddies came up with in the dorm room.

  2. Kirk M. Collins

    I think Americans should reform how the view college. The mounting cost for college tuition should inspire future generations to work tirelessly on their education, in an effort to gain reduced rates from interested universities. The era of the college loan should be dead and buried with the sub-prime mortgage.

  3. Fitzhenrymac

    Even better is free university education, just like high school. That was the earlier Australian system and it prevented the class based education system you have as soon as you have fees. You also got a fortnightly stipend for living expenses. That’s how I got my education from a first class university. There are many countries that have free university education see here Some even provide study abroad expenses. My niece just completed her Australian fine art degree in Spain and the Australian government gave her a free $10,000 living expenses stipend.

  4. Bob "JR" Dobb

    I came from an underprivileged refuge background and completed a B.E. degree at the University of Queensland in Australia. Without the pay as you can afford it scheme i would not have been able to do this. For the final year of my degree i had a well paying part time job and could afford to pay the fees up front, and received a large discount for it. Within three and a half years of my working life I had payed off all loans with no financial hardship … wake up USA are you investing in your future, or running a short con on your best and brightest.

  5. Chris

    The reason IBR is only for partial financial hardship is because when ones income reaches a certain amount based on family size, the percentage of their income (15%) is more than a standard repayment plan. You can argue whether that is too high but the total cost of the loan would go down considerably as opposed to fashioning the system on the Australian model with a considerably smaller percentile of your income. Were we to adopt such a system loans would not be paid for so long people would then accuse it of being a scam by the government to hold people under debt forever and likely end up in the same arguement we are having now with different sides.

  6. Pingback: Can The Australian Model of Student Debt Repayment Save US Students? | In The Red

  7. Geoff Considine

    Even without reform, a lot could be done with financial literacy. I believe that many 18 years olds simply do not understand the choice that they are making when they take on huge loans. This is simply one facet of financial literacy, along with how to budget and the basics of investing effectively.

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