Parent Plus Loans
Parent Plus Loans are another option for your college student to cover the costs of their tuition or other financial needs for college. The Parent Plus loans do not have a limit other than the total cost of your child's college costs. It is a federal loan program which the parents of a college student would take out for their college student/young adult. There are dangers to Parent Plus Loans and pitfalls: as a parent, you must trust your child to actually take their education seriously and be able to pay back their loans upon completion of their education.
Advantages of Parent Plus Loans
The advantages of Parent Plus Loans include the low interest rates that you get from a federal loan program. From my research, it seems that the interest rate is guaranteed to be no more than 6.8% for quite some time and that it is expected to be dropping in the near future. Also there's the advantage of being able to get one Parent Plus loans that will cover all of your student's needs for that school year.
The Education of Our Future
My hope is that we would, as a nation and as a people, put much more effort into improving our education system, and I am not talking about our K-12 system, though that is much needed as well. When was the last time we actually made any improvements to higher education. In my experience, we are actually dumbing down our higher education. What good will Parent Plus Loans do us if all they get us is a sub-par education that does not compete well with the rest of the world. We need to be schooled in the best methods of getting the most of our higher education. Rather than just making education available to more/all people through federal loan programs such as the Parent Plus loans, we need to challenge our students who could understand and accomplish more.
Parent Plus Loans Recipients
Parent Plus Loans recipients are those who have completed their FAFSA applications online and have qualified for assistance based on the student's need and on their family's need. The optimal place to be would be to be able to qualify for enough grants, both federal and state and even school grants, that your student will not even need any extra funds from loans. Obviously, Parent Plus Loans must be repaid at some point in time, as opposed to grants which do not need to be repaid.
