Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 28, 1993 TAG: 9302280061
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
STUDENT-LOAN PROGRAM REVISED
President Clinton has decided to restructure the federal student-loan program to give tens of thousands of college students a way to pay off their loans through national service, administration officials said Friday.The officials said they hoped that by the end of this year a program would be in place that would create about 20,000 jobs in public works and social services in its first year of existence. They estimated that the program would eventually provide more than 100,000 jobs after three years or so for people before or after they attend college.
Clinton will propose spending $9.5 billion over the next five years on the program, they said. Businesses and local governments would be expected to contribute. The money is included in the economic plan made public by the administration last week.
The president plans to announce details of the effort Monday, the 32nd anniversary of former President Kennedy's signing of an executive order to establish the Peace Corps.
As a prelude to demonstrating his commitment to the national service concept, White House officials said, Clinton will also announce a program to provide jobs for 1,000 to 2,000 young people this summer. The administration budgeted about $15 million for the program in the stimulus package he proposed to Congress.
White House officials said they were still tinkering with many details of the broader program, including its exact size and how it would be financed and administered. But it is already clear that the program would start out more modestly than the grand effort that Clinton talked about at virtually every campaign stop in last year's campaign, prompting his biggest applause lines.
Evoking images of Kennedy, Clinton said at one stop that his service proposal would be "a domestic G.I. bill that would give every young American the chance to borrow the money necessary to go to college and ask them to pay it back either as a small percentage of their income over time or through national service as teachers or policemen or nurses or child-care workers."
Clinton's advisers insist that national service is a top priority and will still be a large-scale effort.
"It is remarkable and a sign of deep commitment that in a great period of fiscal stringency, the president was able to make room for a very, very dramatic expansion of opportunities to serve," said William Galston, a domestic policy adviser who has helped develop the program.
Sen. Harris Wofford, D-Pa., who for years has discussed the idea of national service with Clinton and will accompany him to New Jersey on Monday, said: "I think it's going to be a big part of the Clinton administration. It's starting on a big enough scale to get real momentum. But the expansion of it is going to depend on taxpayers in general and young people in particular finding that it really works."
White House officials said many of the details of the program would be contained in a legislative proposal that Clinton will send to Congress in the coming weeks. But the officials said it was clear that the existing federal-guaranteed student-loan program would be overhauled.
Under the plan, students will probably be eligible to get loans directly from the government instead of through banks and pay them back after they graduated. The payment plan would be determined by the person's income.