Holt Joins Call to Stop Student Loan Rate Hike

U.S. Rep. Rush Holt (NJ-12) today joined undergraduates and the presidents of several New Jersey colleges at The College of New Jersey in Ewing to ask Congress to prevent student loan interest rates from doubling on July 1.

“We have 58 days left to fix this – 58 days to prevent students from facing higher costs when they start classes next year,” Holt said in a news release  “On Monday night I hosted a student financial aid workshop. We had an overflow crowd of students and parents from across Central New Jersey. No one there asked how we could make it harder to attend college. They need help, not a $1,000 hike in the cost of attending school.”

Holt says if Congress fails to act, interest rates for more than 7 million students who receive federal student loans will increase from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent on July 1.  Failure to act will add $6.3 billion to students’ debt burden in one year alone, costing the average student borrower about $1,000 in additional repayment costs, Holt said.  In New Jersey, 143,892 students will be forced to pay an additional $115 million in the next year alone.

TCNJ President Dr. R. Barbara Gitenstein, president of The College of New Jersey, said the cost of a TCNJ degree would be out of reach for some without aid programs and subsidized loans. She said more than half her students currently receive  Stafford loans, and that number rises each year. 

According to Holt, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have twice voted this year to allow student loan interest rates to double and to cut higher education by a total of $166 billion. Last week they backtracked and introduced legislation that claims to prevent the rate hike. 

But Holt claims that measure included a “poison pill”:  elimination of the Prevention and Public Health Fund, a program that has provided more than $20.6 million to New Jersey organizations to improve public health.

Holt has cosponsored legislation, HR 4816, to prevent the rate hike and to pay for the cost by eliminating tax subsidies to the Big Oil companies.  The Senate is expected to consider this legislation next week.