loan scheme

Letters

THE current Government’s plan to introduce a student loan scheme is commendable.
It will help ease the burden of so many parents and citizens who are struggling to pay school fees.
The idea itself looks good but I have one question?
Did we have any of such arrangement as student loan scheme in the past, or is this a new model we trying to adopt from Australian federal government?
I recall in 2005 the Office of Higher Education publishing in full-page newspaper advertisements, the list of students who were not able to pay back loans they got some years back.
I happened to stand next to a friend whose name was listed on the paper.
By then, he was already working and he pointed his fingers to his name and said: “See this, I am one of those culprits.”
As a first-year student at University of PNG that time, I asked him out of curiosity: “What happens if you don’t repay the loan?”
He responded: “Unless there is some form of effective tracking system of student database, they will not track me down.”
I sense that the idea is good but the approach is reactive to the situation.
Leaders should be proactive and be able to revisit the systems and practices that we had in the past, like student loan schemes.
Assess the scheme and see the outcome, what we achieved and where we went wrong, and what we should do to improve the existing loan scheme.
I don’t think we need a model.
We already have systems and practices that we just need to revisit and improve, using the current advanced wave of ICT on our finger tips to establish a network of advanced database systems to monitor and keep track of records.
The way forward is to revisit the existing system, fine-tune it and make it more sustainable to cater for this generation and into the future.
There is no need to adopt a new system.

Kande Marhn
Waigani