An Analysis Of The National Student Loan System: Problems And Countermeasures

With today's global financial constraints on higher education, States have adopted a loan-based student financial assistance scheme to solve the problem of unfairness to poor students, enabling them to receive higher education. Moreover, student loans with government subsidies have been widely used in more than 50 countries and regions. It is more important for China, which is a developing country with scarce higher-education resources, to use the National Student Loan to help poor students receive higher education funding.China's National Student Loan system has been in operation for eight years, since 1999.It has played a positive role in respect of relieving funding pressure on poor students attending schools. However, the actual coverage rate of student loans is still very low and a higher rate of breach of contract has arisen due to policy design flaws within the National Student Loan system still exist today. Therefore, there is an urgent need to learn from the successful experience of other countries in order to improve China's National Student Loan system. This thesis analysis of the existing problems of our country's National Student Loan system will introduce the vast experience of more developed countries and provide a practical reference.This thesis is divided into five parts. The first part puts forward the methods used to study this topic by illustrating the purpose and significance of this study and the research both at home and abroad; that is, utilizing economic, management, educational, financial and other multidisciplinary perspectives, analyzing the National Student Loan system of our country, using comparative analysis and empirical research methods.The second part comprehensively expounds the basic concept of the National Student Loan and illustrates the development of our country's National Student Loan system. The National Student Loan is the significant measure of the State's use of financial means to fund students who are faced with financial difficulties in college, under the conditions of a socialist market economy. It is the student loan which Loaners offer to borrowers who are full-time college students, graduate students and second-degree students in the People's Republic of China (excluding Hong Kong and Macao Special Administrative Regions, Taiwan region) colleges and universities experiencing economic difficulties. This is subsidized by central or local government and is to be used to pay tuition fees and living expenses of borrowers. Our country's National Student Loan system has experienced a number of amendments and improvements, although these are being put into practice late. In this thesis, the development process of our country's National Student Loan is divided into four stages, they are initial stage, implementation stage, modification stage and improvement stage.The third part analyses the National Student Loan operating system features of developed countries such as the United States, Japan and Australia, and debates which national systems our country should learn from.The fourth part points out the existing problems of the operation of National Student Loans in our country. Through comparison with other countries in the world, we can analyze why these problems exist in our country.The fifth part puts forward recommendations of how to further improve the design of our National Student Loans system with respect to altering existing policy, amending the credit system, altering the structure of the loan and so on, through analyse and comparisons drawn in the four parts previously mentioned.