GPA Requirement for Student Loans Will Not Motivate Students

In a country where a college education is strongly encouraged to obtain employment, many young adults feel socially pushed to obtain a bachelor’s degree. With public universities costing about $40,000 a year, paying for college can be quite a challenge. The majority of students are left with one option to finance college – student loans.

Because many past college students defer repayments or fail to payback their loans, banks are now debating whether to require a minimum GPA in order to receive a loan. Though many may agree, I believe that there are underlying factors that must be taken into consideration.

One factor is a psychological one of student motivation. The old and easy way to approach student motivation is in the philosophy of: Students will do the bare minimum needed to pass based on where I set my expectations. Though this is true, my next question is: Why do they do the bare minimum in the first place? The answer lies in three levels in student motivation. All students are one of these types of learners: mastery, failure avoidance, and learned failure.

The majority of students fall into the failure avoidance category. These are the students that “do the bare minimum to get by”. The reason for this motivation is because they fear receiving an F, but are so focused on the grade that they are not motivated to truly learn due to an underlying lack of confidence. Learned failures are students who have struggled early on in school that they simply do not have the motivation to try. They’ve learned how to fail and have lost the confidence in themselves to do better.

Knowing that the majority of students are failure avoidance, I feel that by implementing a minimum GPA requirement for a student loan would intimidate and ultimately discourage students. This would especially be true for any student who has needed any special education in their K-12 education. They may feel that they are not “smart” enough to maintain the minimum requirement and simply not go to college. This could potentially create the opposite effect of Obama’s goal to have more high school graduates going to college.

The other major factor is my thought of: How would a high GPA mean that a student will pay back the loan? A person with a 4.0 may be just as likely as someone with a 2.0 to not pay back their student loan. There are too many additional factors to be taken into consideration other than GPA when it comes to repayment. Also, many colleges, degree programs, organizations, and internships already have minimum GPA requirements.

In my perspective, it looks like a way to “weed out” students, though all should be given an equal opportunity. After all, how can anyone truly determine what a person is capable of accomplishing?


People also view

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *