To Avoid Repaying Loans, Some Students Leave the U.S.

Some student loan borrowers in the United States have moved to other countries due to their inability to repay student debt and maintain an appropriate lifestyle due to the high cost of living in the country.

These youngsters in debt have moved to countries where the cost of living is lower than the U.S while the debt collection mechanism is unable to stop them from leaving the country, reported CNBC.

In its report, CNBC has narrated the stories of three youngsters, who cite their inability to repay the student debts without a suitable job as the main reason behind their decision to leave America. One of them is living in India while the other two are living in Ukraine and Japan.

Chad Haag, 29, has moved to a village in Kerala in southern India, where he pays $50 as his house rent per month. He admits that his loan of $20,000 was not a big amount when compared to others, but the difficulty in finding a college-level job back home made this figure huge for him.

After graduating in 2011, he couldn’t get a fair income job and went back to complete his masters in comparative literature, which could give him a post of an adjunct professor with only one class in a semester. He even worked as a medical courier boy but only to get $1700 per month, from which he had to pay a good amount to clear his debt. After facing such hardships, he left America and started living in India.

Chad Albright, 39, found himself without a good job and had a loan of $30,000 on him. He moved to China and taught children English there to earn $1,000 per month. After a few years, he moved to Ukraine and now teaches there. He doesn’t have any plans of moving back to the states anytime soon.

Katrina Williams too shares a similar story. She tried hard to get jobs to repay her loans but couldn’t earn enough. She moved to Japan in 2015 and her loan back home has swelled to over $100,000.

According to the news report, over the last decade, unpaid student loans have tripled and are expected to reach $2 trillion by 2022. Currently, students are under an average debt of $30,000 while they graduate. This debt has nearly doubled when compared with the early 1990s. However, the case is not the same when it comes to the salaries of fresh graduates, which have been almost flat in the last decade.

The problem is even worse for students who leave their studies in the middle. These people don’t qualify for high-income jobs, which could help them clear their earlier loans and they can’t go back to the school to complete their graduation until the earlier loan is paid, says Axios, an American news website.

CNBC cites the U.S. Department of Education as saying that “half of the student loan borrowers haven’t paid even $1 toward their debt’s principal five years into repayment.” Brookings Institution expects 40 percent of student loan borrowers defaulting by 2023.