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Gov’t urges UG students to apply for student loan write-off as applications trickle in
Kaieteur News- Applications for the write-off of University of Guyana’s loan have been trickling in, Senior Minister in the Office of the President with responsibility for Finance, Dr. Ashni Singh said on Tuesday.
Speaking with reporters on the sidelines of an event said that the Student Loan Agency was asked recently to simplify the process for the write-off.
“Since we announced the student loans write-off, the application has been coming in but they haven’t been coming in at the speed at which we would like to see them coming because we really want to get this exercise completed and so we simplified the process we now have an online portal through which you can just click on a link and submit your application and once you click send or submit, it goes to the Student Loan Agency and they process it and I have asked them to ramp up their capacity to process it on a timely manner,” the minister told reporters.
Gov’t urges UG students to apply for student loan write-off as applications trickle in
According to the Senior Minister, he suspects that a lot of people may have not been forthcoming because the authorities have not been aggressive about pursuing people to have it repay.
Notwithstanding, he said, “I think it is in your interest if you have an outstanding student loan, it is in your interest to get rid of that indebtedness and so I want to first of all to reiterate the message that our government has announced the writing off student’s loan and I want to urge everybody who has an outstanding student loan to come in click on the link and apply and get your loan written off and we want to do that as quickly as possible.”
It was recently reported that the government, through the Ministry of Finance, has written off approximately $203.7 million in student debt owed. This was highlighted in the Ministry of Finance’s 2024 mid-year report, which revealed that this latest development has benefitted around 346 persons to date.
Within the second half of the year, an additional 2,900 persons are expected to benefit from this initiative.
Meanwhile, speaking about their announcement on the removal of tuition fees at the University of Guyana from the 1st of January next year, the Senior Minister noted that this makes access to universal education even more affordable for people.
However, he said that the initiative would have an implication for students who are on scholarship because this means they would no longer would be paying tuition fees.
The minister explained also that there are still people who are interested in having a scholarship because the scholarship comes with a stipend, and cover significant expenses. Acknowledging the implication, Minister Singh said on Tuesday that he has since engaged the staff at the Ministry of Public Service about the number of students and noted that there will be changes made to the scholarship programme.
“I want to say very clearly that this government’s position is that we want to make things as least onerous as they could possibly be. We are not in the business of imposing onerous obligations on people, and so to the extent that we can remove or ease the obligations that are associated with scholarships we certainly will do so and we have been adopting a more relaxed stance in relation to people who are serving scholarship obligations,” he stated.
(Gov’t urges UG students to apply for student loan write-off as applications trickle in)
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