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<title> Relieve our burden! </title>
For a long time now, it has been a widespread myth that students of today are quite well off, that they can easily afford to do most of the things they want to do in their spare time, and that they have a brilliant future to look forward to. Recently, there has also been some concern about the way students experience the new Swedish system of students' loans. Let me here propose and argue for a new system of student financiation, where students' loans are replaced by grants.
As of today, the old argument that students, upon graduation, always get a better salary when compared to people who haven't studied at the university, is, and has for a long time been, outmoded. As a matter of fact, the surfacing of some new sectors of our enterprise culture - mainly concerned with IT and self-employed businesses - have clearly shown, that nowadays salaries are increasingly rarely dependent on higher education, although that is still often the case. There are quite a lot of students who, after years spent at the university, take the first cautious steps out to the labour-market just to discover that most people of the same age get better paid regardless of whether they have studied at the university or not. This applies to several sectors, of course, but becomes even more blatant when considering jobs related to the humanities; the loans are often seen as an extra burden that the former student has to deal with beyond the problem of getting a proper job, and this is hardly a way to get more people to study at the university, which seems to be a general goal in recent politics.
If students were able to concentrate more on their studies and worry less about their future financial situations, they would most certainly achieve better results in their studies. This would also, indirectly, relieve society of some common inconveniences that are related to students' stress, such as insomnia, nervous disorders, gastric ulcers, etc., which are most likely consequences of students worrying about future salaries with which to repay their loans. The frequently repeated claim, that this reform would be too expensive for society, is easily countered by the fact that there is a considerable loss of public money on the large number of students who drop out of university - without completing their studies and thus getting their degrees - just in order to get jobs outright and be able to pay back their loans before they are eventually written off upon retiring. In fact, there is a possibility that society as a whole would benefit from students getting grants instead of loans, when taking into account all the time that would be saved and better spent on successful studies instead of sheer anxiety. There is no guessing as to how much time students spend on contemplating their outlook, and it goes without saying that much of this time could be put to better use.
Lastly, if students got grants instead of loans, this would probably encourage more people who lack an academic background to study at the university. People who are, under the present system, afraid of taking loans would, with a generous grant-system, at least have a chance to see if university level studies have anything to offer, and in the long run perhaps level out the now existing, somewhat oblique recruitment to the university.
All this goes to show that society would almost certainly benefit a whole lot if students were given grants instead of loans to finance their studies. The times have changed, and nowadays it is often a drawback to have spent several years at the university when considering how much money the average student owes the State and how many people can get a better-paid job without studying at the university. This is hardly encouraging people to go to the university, which could, in the long run, be rather devastating to future academic achievements.
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