Stop Calling Student Loans 'Financial Aid' - Salon.com

Stop Calling Student Loans 'Financial Aid'

Do we make both a conceptual and analytical mistake when we refer to student loans as a form of “financial aid”? Should that term be something to be resisted? Demos’ Tamara Draut brought up this point in a conversation recently, and I think it needs to be explored further, because it frames how we speak about student loans.

The government records and documents student loans as a form of aid. Here’s a list of the ”amount of financial aid awarded to full-time, full-year undergraduates, by type and source of aid,” and loans are listed right next to grants. When pundits say that “student aid” has exploded over the past decade and argue that aid is driving increases in tuition, it disguises that the “aid” which has exploded is a signficant amount of debt for young people.

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