New Loan Forgiveness Program for Engineering Students

Very interesting - President Bush signed this into law this week. I should think that a lot of students would benefit from this.

From here.

This could be good news for my nephew. He’s starting college this year, planning to major in engineering. I’ll have to pass the info on to my sis.

Oh man, that would cover most of my loans, awesome.

This is great news I could get a majority of my loans paid off. Thanks for the info.

Dang it, how come the science guys get all the breaks!? Doesn’t anybody care about good grammar any more?

[takes English MA and goes to sulk in the corner]

When we start having to issue visas to Indian and Chinese Freudian Deconstructionists, we’ll start forgiving your student loans, too. (My first one was in Film Studies - yeah, no one forgives your loans because you can do genre analysis).

It’s not just science grads; there are provisions in the legislation for all kinds of folks:

(my emphasis)

This “other” category contains a lot of things, from nurses to school audiologists to lawyers. Check it out. :slight_smile:

My sister was happy to see the link. They just bought my nephew’s first semester texts - around $1K - USED!!! :eek: That’s obscene. Really.

Thanks for that.

Living in Detroit area, we are up to our armpits in engineers here. I forwarded the article to my husbands boss who has engineering student-kids.

Grammer? What’s that?

Sunrazor, got more room for another to sulk with you?

So is that supposed to be automatic, or do we have to apply for it? Or are we just waiting for more details when the program is implemented?

Is it only for current students? I graduated four years ago, but I’m still up to my eyeballs in debt.

Oh, and I assume I’d have to actually have an engineering job too, right? :frowning:

Fuck. :mad:

ETA after reading the article (you’d think I’d have done that before):

Shortage of engineers? Somebody tell that to the companies that aren’t hiring me, and haven’t been for four fucking years. :mad: :mad:

I agree. I am not aware of any labor shortage in the engineering market. Furthermore, it isn’t such an inelastic or long training program that I think it is wise for the government to try to interfere in the marketplace by forgiving some student loans for engineers but not others.

“We need for scientists and engineers!” is a good slogan or line in a State of the Union address, but it does not seem to be born out by the reality of the engineering job market. In fact, I believe that our undergrad institutions are producing adequate numbers of engineering graduates at present.

This was not for engineers exclusively (as I mentioned upthread). Many professions were included in this bill:

Have I missed something? I wasn’t aware that you had been in engineering school. For some reason, I thought your degree was in something else. :confused:
The quoted article is referring to the Civil Engineering profession. The debate over whether or not there is a shortage of Civil Engineers has been ongoing for as long as I’ve been out of school (20 years). The following is from the May 2007 issue of the Fort Worth Branch’s newsletter :

An editorial in the Savannah Branch’s newsletter of October 2006 had this to say:

Here is a site with some debate about it. I won’t muddy the water with my opinion on it, but I’m a bit surprised that someone in the engineering field has never heard of the subject before. YMMV.

Nope, graduated in '04 from RPI with a BS in biomedical engineering. I also spent a year trying to get my masters at UVM but a combination of my stupidity and lack of money forced to to “take a break.”

I know the lawyers that do civil legal aid are salivating over the possibility. They’ve had a pilot loan assistance program, but this one will cover a lot more. And when you’re trying to lawyers at under 40K a year to serve the poor, when they come saddled with five- or six-figure law school loans, you’re really not going to have much of a shot at getting them; they’re going to have to go to the big firms that pay insane salaries.

So here’s hoping that Congress actually funds the bill. Because all the legislation in the world won’t do shit without the $$ appropriated to back it up.

Thank you NinetyWt!I initially ignored the thread since it said “engineers”, but Cheez_Whia alerted me to the fact that this covers more. Good news for my husband, who just began his internship at the LA District Attorney’s office in preparation for employment there after the bar. And for me, too, as I’ll be there in four years as well, hopefully.

Does it include software engineers?

Yeah…I know…and I agree with those those who say that SW development is not truly an engineering field.

I don’t call myself an engineer normally, but hey, if it means I can get on board with this program, then I’ll call myself an engineer!