The cost burden of higher education

 

Their responses follow the Student Loan Fund announcing that its debt-restructuring fair will be held from October until December. The event is for long-time debtors. 

The SLF also revealed it had the seized assets from 1,000 debtors or their guarantors to be auctioned off, and was poised to seize more assets from other debtors or their guarantors. 

A freelance web developer in her 30s who borrowed about Bt300,000 said the news of tougher measures against debtors didn’t worry her.

She has been repaying Bt10,000 a month, or every other month, “depending on my financial situation at the time”.

“The original amount of debt remains Bt200,000 but if combined with hefty fines it stands at about Bt300,000,” she said. 

She said she could not get a job straight away after graduating from a Bangkok university and the jobs she has had didn’t pay her enough money to repay the loan. She had also been responsible for repaying her family’s huge debts.

Because she moved a lot, the SLF couldn’t reach her and they finally brought her mum, the loan guarantor, to court over the debt.

That resulted in her entering in to a debt-restructuring programme that resulted in her getting a new loan contract which requires her to pay at least Bt3,000 a month. 

With her family’s debts finally paid off, she stuck with the programme and her job situation became secure last year. “I want to end this debt soon,” she said. 

She suggested the SLF implement an online channel for repayments because going to a designated bank branch to make the payment was inconvenient. “Such a channel would make my repayments to SLF more consistent,” she explained.

A company employee in her 30s who borrowed Bt200,000 from the SLF said that she repaid the required amount yearly. “But my lack of spending discipline landed me in a huge pile of credit card debt so sometimes I paid later than I should have and my mum got warning letters from SLF. I just told her to chill because I would pay it later in the year when I got a bonus,” she said. 

The SLF’s low-interest loan led to her repaying higher-interest debts first. With her SLF debt down to Bt30,000, she said she would get rid of it as soon as possible. 

“I don’t want to avoid repaying the money that helped send me places in life, you know, and other kids should have this chance, too. But sometime I have to pay other things first. At least I try to stick with it, though there are delays,” she said, adding that she struggled with the consequences of her lack of spending discipline. 

An office worker in her 30s said that she borrowed about Bt90,000 from the SLF to support her college tuition and expenses and started repaying it after the post-graduation two-year grace period ended. As of now, over Bt70,000 remains.

She paid Bt1,000 per month for a while and then found herself often falling behind in repayments so she often skipped them and paid only when she remembered. 

But she said she did not worry too much about it. “I have other credit and cash-loan debts, which, if I failed to pay, would affect my credit |bureau status  meaning I cannot do certain transactions or borrow |any more money,” she said. And not repaying the SLF loan didn’t result in serious problems because the government didn’t send debt collectors after her. 

However in response to the SLF’s tougher measures, she said she was “horrified” and would start repaying the debt again, starting immediately.