By Lily Nguyen

Karen Allen photo. Money to burn for now. Lily Nguyen has a student loan she expects to start paying next year.

If you get a car loan, the banks expect you to pay it off. If you get a mortgage, ditto. If you get a student loan...

When you get a student loan, you fill out a form asking for as much as you can get, regardless of whether you actually need the money. The student loan office probably won't give you all of it, but that's why you apply for the maximum – because you're smart and you figure the more you ask for the more you get, right?

(If they give you more than you need, woohoo! After all, it's like free money. Thousands of dollars for signing on the dotted line – and you don't have to worry about it until you graduate.)

When you graduate and that six-month interest-free period wears off, that's a different story. Then you realize this is money you owe, money you have to pay back, at a rate of hundreds of dollars a month, if you have an average debt load of about $25,000. So what do you do?

If you're smart, you try your darndest to get out of paying it. Right?

You're lucky, because you've got organizations like the Canadian Federation of Students and the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations on side. With a total membership of about 650,000 students, they work on behalf of students who don't want to deal with their debt.

They're not too bad at it either. The way it is now, those who can't afford to repay their loan can apply to put that sick thing into remission. Another form and some proof that you're only making enough to cover the bare necessities, and the federal government forgives about $10,000 from a $25,000 loan.

If that burden is still too heavy, the federal government gives you 24 more months of interest relief. (Translation: you don't have to pay a cent for up to two and a half years.) By any standards, those are pretty good terms for a loan that paid for a degree, four years of education, maybe a few beers after classes.

But that's the way it was before the Canadian Opportunities Strategy, a student-aid package announced in the 1998 federal budget.

Now, you can get up to five years before you must start paying. The strategy also created the $2.5-billion Millennium Scholarship Fund, which will start awarding scholarships in the year 2000 of up to $3,000 a year to a maximum of $15,000, based on need and merit. With the scholarship, the average student loan holder should have a debt level not much higher than the 1990 debt levels of $8,700. Student groups hold that up as the ideal.

These are better terms.

But the scholarship fund and the whole aid package has been villified by the very student organizations (CASA reservedly, CFS heatedly) whose membership will doubtless still take the money.

We need more, they say. Of course they do. Not only is it their job, but they're made up of students. They know the drill. Always ask for the maximum, whether it's justified or not, because then the government gives you more.

Never mind that a loan means something you pay back.

"It's a right that people should go to school," says Elizabeth Carlyle, chair of the Canadian Federation of Students.

In Canada, k-12 is a right, and it's also a legal requirement. Post-secondary education isn't a right. That's why we pay for it, just like we pay for a nice car and a nice house, and the beer we drank through university. But another reason we pay for it is even more compelling – because it's been repeatedly demonstrated, not to mention common knowledge, that people with degrees make way more than people without degrees. That's not the rule, but it's the norm, even for English majors. That's why so many people are willing to make that investment. That's the reason they sign up for a loan, even though they know it has to be paid back.

Or maybe they don't know that. Maybe they were counting on collective whining to get them off the hook. Considering that the '98 budget has capitulated to some degree, it's clear it's an effective strategy.

The Canadian Federation of Students whines that the 100,000 students who will receive the Millennium scholarships represent only seven per cent of the student body. Never mind that it's a scholarship, which means just more free money. Exact criteria for determining who gets what money haven't been decided yet. If it's need-based, that seven per cent are likely to be the ones who need it most.

What they've said less about is the five-year interest relief period. When I asked CFS chair Elizabeth Carlyle about it, she admitted it would help to a small extent, but not enough. Besides, she said, the government has put a ban on people declaring bankruptcy on their student loans for up to 10 years. Five years of interest relief would still mean five years before students can kill their debt obligations for good by filling out some more forms and declaring bankruptcy. That's rough.

And five years is a long time. Most people wouldn't work for five years at a job that doesn't provide them with enough income to repay a student loan that will be less than the typical car loan. They would have moved on, found another career, or gone back for more schooling (and more interest-free time).

The lustre of the Canadian Opportunities Strategy was quickly tarnished by the power-sensitive provinces, which said it trampled on provincial jurisdiction. They have a point, but students don't. Everyone knows the job market won't offer graduates any guarantees or security. They shouldn't expect more from the institutions that are supposed to prepare them for that job market.