The U.S. Department of Education announced Tuesday the interest rates on federal student loans for the 2024-2025 academic year.
The interest rate on federal direct undergraduate loans will be 6.53%. That’s the highest rate in at least a decade, according to higher education expert Mark Kantrowitz. The undergraduate rate for the 2023-2024 year is 5.5%.
For graduate students, loans will come with an 8.08% interest rate, compared with the current 7.05%. Plus loans for graduate students and parents will have a 9.08% interest rate, an increase from 8.05% now. Both of those rates haven’t been as high in more than 20 years, Kantrowitz said.
The rise in interest rates could complicate the Biden administration’s efforts to get the student loan crisis under control and relieve borrowers of the pain of interest accrual, experts say. Even as millions of people have benefited from recent debt relief measures, new students will be saddled with more expensive loans for decades to come.
I started my undergraduate just after the worst of the '08 market crash when rates were also at this level. Saddling a teenager with paying off tens of thousands of dollars at 7.5% interest literally crippled me. These rate increases are just kicking the can down to road to a future generation so that they can espouse headlines that they've done something beneficial while doing nothing to help fix the problem. All of the "forgiveness" pieces we've been seeing are just them fixing the broken promises through the 10 year repayment forgiveness and PLSF programs anyway.
And chuds are still malding about that
I was on a few of those threads and it was infuriating. So many dont let perfect be the enemy of good energy and biden bootlickers. All they did is unfuck what had been broken for years, no progress in actually solving student debt crisis actually took place