Loan Advice for Seniors

By Ji Kim
Elm Staff Writer

Associate Director of Student Aid Cailean Leith hopes that Washington College graduating seniors will have the information they need to navigating repaying their student loans.

Leith said it is important that seniors complete their federal loan exit counseling by making an appointment with the Office of Student Aid in order to fulfill their graduation requirement and understand all of their options.

Leith said that exit counseling is required by the federal government for all graduating seniors, but the counseling session is to make sure that seniors leave college well-informed about their student loan debts and how they plan to pay it off. He said that the exit counseling is a 15 to 30 minute session that goes over key information such as loan amounts, interest rates, time frames for repayment, and options regarding repayment.

“We like to do one-on-one counseling; this way we feel that it’s better to walk through the online counseling portion with you, which is how the federal government checks off on your exit counseling completion, and provide all of the pertinent information about your loan,” said Leith.

He said that this one-on-one counseling allows the session to tend to each student’s specific situation.

“There’s just a lot of information to take in, and some of it is important to certain students and some of it isn’t important to other students…If you’re a student going into graduate school then my conversation with you is going to go a bit differently than someone who is going to start working or someone going into the Peace Corps or the military. There are a lot of different options that are important
to go over,” he said.

Leith said that there are numerous options within student loan debts and repayment.

“Student loan debts are one of the most flexible types of debt that you’ll ever accumulate in your life,” he said. “Car payments, mortgage payments—those are all set, you’re going to pay what you’re going to pay. But federal student loans have a lot of options that you can use to make those monthly payments more manageable and those are things that students need to know. They need to know their options.”

Leith said that one of his central pieces of advice “is to stay in touch with your loan servicer because they will help you.”

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