To get a student loan at Broward College, one of Florida's largest community colleges, you first have to sit through a two-hour financial lesson with Kent Dunston.
It's a little like Scared Straight, the 1978 documentary designed to keep kids from ending up in prison.
Dunston's lesson, though, is about scaring students into making good financial choices. Nationwide, student loans total more than $1.2 trillion. And schools now face punishment — even closure — by the federal government if the rate is too high.
You're not going to borrow more than the amount of money you need to attend, Dunston tells the students. "You'll be offered more. You don't need it."
Broward College, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., launched this class six years ago, just one effort aimed at preventing students from taking on so much debt that default on their loans. And, starting this year, the school began trying something else: barring students from borrowing more than they need.
The school stopped accepting unsubsidized loans — those are the more expensive federal loans that require students to begin making interest payments right away. (The federal government pays that interest on subsidized loans while a student is enrolled).
Broward, along with 28 other community, four-year and online colleges around the country, is trying the subsidized-loan-only approach as part of an experiment with the federal government to cut down on student debt. Subsidized loans can wait until after a student graduates for payment.
And while the federal experiment limits access only to federal unsubsidized loans, Broward has gone even farther — it has stopped accepting private loans, too.
Read more at WNPR News: http://wnpr.org/post/cut-student-debt-florida-college-cuts-some-student-borrowing