From: The Cap Times

Dear Editor: What is more important: $400 a month to a multi-billion-dollar company, or our nation educating its best and brightest? A pound of flesh, or increasing diversity in academia?
I now face this choice: abandon my field of study to meet obligations to a student loan company, or ruin my financial future.
My graduate program in Latin American history at UW-Madison is arguably the nation’s best, and I have excelled in it, receiving numerous awards and fellowships while maintaining a perfect 4.0 GPA. I have a record of service locally and internationally. Were it not for my loan burden, I would be well positioned to become one of the nation’s few Latino Ph.D.s (1,157 according to the 2000 census).
Unfortunately, as an undergraduate I had to seek loan assistance to attend college. I accumulated many tens of thousands of dollars in debt. In the folly of youth, I did not realize how it might limit my future career choices. Now it appears that I will be forced to abandon a full-ride scholarship to a Ph.D. in order to pay off my undergraduate loans.
An arbitrary 48-month restriction on my private loan deferments leave me with the option to leave my program to find work in order pay the entire monthly amount of $400, or take an interest-only option of $200 monthly. The latter option will expire before I am scheduled to complete my degree, making it little different from the former. Forty-eight months is insufficient time to obtain advanced degrees.
How is it well advised for a company that is ostensibly in the business of enabling students in need to set limits that bar them from achieving their maximum potential? How can we as a society value such small sums of money over equal access to education for its brightest students, regardless of income?

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